Reply #26: perhaps, and I knew a guy making $9 an hour at a grocery story

[hfojvt]

in the 1980s. Or maybe it was $8 an hour. This was in 1984. In 1985, when I graduated from college, I took a government job and GS-7 was paying $8.57 an hour. I actually took the job for GS-5 pay which would have been $2 an hour less, but my first paycheck was GS-7. I didn't complain. Perhaps my higher grades qualified me to be a GS-7 instead of a 5. Point is, here was a college graduate accepting a $7 an hour job when a college student is making $8 an hour working at a grocery store.

Hard to remember though, since we have lived most of our lives in a post wal-mart world. I remember in the late 1980s, there was a big fight in my little town to get a mall opened up. Many of the people in town wanted the mall, and the K-mart that came with it. The Chamber of Commerce, the richest people in town, didn't want the mall, but many residents were driving four hours to shop in Sioux Falls. I also remember it was a big deal to get the Christmas catalogs from Sears, Montgomery Wards and JCPenneys. As kids we used to page through them and pick out things we wanted. That was how we shopped even though there was a Penneys downtown I think, although I really just remember the one at the mall.

At that time, I had never heard of Wal-mart. The first Wal-mart I saw was in a small town in Wisconsin in 1987 when I moved there. I figured Wal-mart was just a smaller copy of K-mart. Never heard of Wal-mart when I was going to University for 5 years in Minneapolis either.