Money still went a much longer way than today (housing, school, vehicles were cheaper) but yeah obviously poor people still had it rough (probably most of them rougher than today)
Here's an anecdote from when I was about 5 or 6 from the couple of years when my mother wasn't working as a bookkeeper for a car dealership in town...
The acreage we lived on wasn't far from where Highway 2 bypassed Red Deer on the way to Edmonton, 2A continued on into Red Deer, and the strip of commercial places common to any outskirts of a city that weren't in the city proper were actually close by (a strip of forest separated it from us, thankfully, or I'd probably never have been allowed farther than a fenced-in yard with usually dying grass because my grandfather didn't see the point of wasting water on the lawn when it was bound to rain at some point).
Nowadays Highway 2 is known as QE2 because Premier Klein renamed it after the Queen (dunno what she thought of it).
Anyway, going back to the late '60s... one day my mother loaded some bags and me into her Ranchero, and we spent the afternoon going up and down the ditches alongside the highway for a couple of miles - both side, north and south, and near the overpass, looking for bottles.
Beer bottles mostly, but also pop bottles (no plastic then; everything was glass). People would just throw their bottles out the window into the ditch when finished with them and keep driving.
Bottle pickers did a service back then of helping to clean up this part of the unwanted stuff that litters the highway (I was told NOT to pick up garbage, only bottles), but the motive was that we would get MONEY for the empties. Altruistic environmental motives weren't common at the time.
A whopping 2 cents/item was paid when we brought to the bottle depot.
Still, we'd managed 3 bags full. And the money my mother got from that went toward material to make me some school clothes for Grade 1 (I never did kindergarten; not many kids from the county did).
Choosing one data point to compare life in the 50s with life today is ignoring the hundreds of ways that life has changed between then and now. Housing then was not like housing now and the participation by banks and other lenders was different too. The consumerism we have now was mostly non existent then. Important appliances were a stove, refrig, toaster, vacuum, radio, washing machine. There were no subscription services (other than magazines). One car families dominated those who owned cars.
Lots of door-to-door sales were going on. There were Avon ladies, don't recall when Tupperware started, but my mother got sucked into AmWay for awhile... jewelry, perfume, cosmetics, and a whole lot of stuff got sold at the door or at "parties" (yeah, I've been to a Tupperware party a couple of times).
All these were acceptable ways for a housewife to earn some extra money.
(keep in mind that my recollections are from the mid-late '60s)
