It was in October each year that my coal-delivery business started to pick up. It was an all-day Saturday job for which my Uncle George paid me the equivalent of two dollars.
Married to my mother's sister, Uncle George owned and operated a small corner store offering canned and packaged food, a modest variety of cheeses, a good selection of vegetables and fruit - and coal.
The coal was stored in a huge backyard in mounds of various sizes and was sold by the hundredweight, which if my memory holds true, was 112 pounds on an English weigh scale. Uncle George's father - known to me as "granddad" - ran the Saturday coal yard. I never did know granddad's first name, and being a polite young lad, never presumed to ask.
Most customers brought their own wheelbarrows, watched the scales as granddad weighed their hundredweight, paid him in cash and rumbled off down the street. And every Saturday, half a dozen elderly ladies or gentlemen lacking their own wheelbarrows, or being too old to handle a hundredweight of coal, would wander in to choose the size of coal they wanted - large lumps or "cobs."
Large lumps burn slower, smaller cobs burn brighter but disappear faster, important decisions to be carefully made when coal fires are your only source of energy for warmth or cooking.
With decisions made, the coal would be sacked, placed in the company wheelbarrow, a four-wheeled brute, and I would clatter forth. Walking ahead would be the customer guiding me to their sometimes close, sometimes blocks-away homes.
There was no charge for delivery, and in the extremely harsh economic times of the 1930s, no tips for the delivery boy and, believe it or not, none expected.
At the end of the day, a meal would be shared with aunt, uncle and granddad - after the coal-yard crew had scrubbed themselves clean. I would then trot home, my pay jingling in my pocket, demanding to be spent. But before I could launch myself to a Saturday night Tom Mix movie, there had to be the equivalent of a 50-cent deduction paid to my mother.
When I earned my first Saturday pay, I thought it a bit greedy and unfair that mother should chisel into my hard-earned cash. I was maybe 15 - a two-year coal-delivery veteran - before I understood where my weekly 50-cent contribution ended up. It was paid into a layaway plan down at the local Co-op store. Mother first used the layway plan to make sure Christmas was a decent celebration for her five children. Later, she used it to buy family treats like radios and new clothes.
It was a simple system. You just paid a store to hold an object for you until you had enough saved to buy it outright. The reverse of the way we do things now, where we take possession of goods - then decide if we can really afford them.
And often discover too late we can't.
It was pay-as-you-go until "fly now, pay later" became the way to go and new plastic cards provided immediate access to Ali Baba's cave and treasures once available only to the rich.
The parents of the boomer generation will remember - and some senior boomers may - the gruelling interview conducted by the bank manager when a loan was sought. And the demand for the signature of guarantor to repay the loan if you defaulted. Fly now, pay later ended those third-degree sessions and became the new, easy way to paradise. Layaway plans, once offered by most major stores, shuffled off into the shadows.
The great slide into individual, family and government debt began and continues to accelerate at alarming speed.
The average non-mortgage debt of a Canadian family this year is $26,221 - which is low when compared with the average debt of a British Columbia family, which economists list at a staggering $37,879. It's the highest debt load in the country at the provincial level.
The cross-country average is lower only because families in other provinces are less ravenous than British Columbians when it comes to the acquisition of material things they can't afford. The average debt of a 2012 Quebec family is listed at a modest $18,580.
There was a time when we could look to government to take strong actions to halt the slide to ruin - or at least slow it down. But it is difficult in this day and age for any government - municipal, regional, provincial or federal - to preach a frugal way of life when they lead the way in accumulating debt. Fearful of rejection if they deny their constituents what they know they can't afford, they just raise taxes to pay back appeasement loans. Provincially, we are billions in debt, federally a trillion or more, family-wise and individually millions are in a mess.
Pay-as-you-go has become a joke, "layaway" a dirty word. And that's a pity.
