I swear McDonald's used to feed a family of 4 for $20 back in the day I swear it did. Unless I'm crazy

@Musicman There was a place in Topeka where you could get a small burger, fries and a drink for 35 cents when I was in 5th grade. My sister and I would collect coins and walk a half mile there sometimes in the middle of the day. We never told because my father would have had a cow spending money like that. We usually only got a burger and drink for a quarter.

@cherokeepatti Fortunately my mom would take me.

@Musicman My mom wouldn’t have been allowed to I’m sure. We had the money, both were getting VA disability and they were also getting a check for us 3 children. But my father loved to drink on his money and my mother had to pay a lot of the bills. Where did we get the money to go to that hamburger place? My father forced us to play penny poker with him and if he won he put the money in a large jar of change. The money we had was the $2 a month allowance that he gave us. Even back then you couldn’t buy that much with $2. But oh, to make it better, he took a dollar and made us gamble with it effectively getting half of the generous allowance back from us. So we were really getting $1 a month. Me and my younger sister justified dipping into the jar because he was playing a crappy game with us to do that. We ended up getting caught when he noticed the change wasn’t as high up in the jar as it was before. He didn’t beat us and that was a surprise but we didn’t do it again.

@cherokeepatti My dad was a workaholic. We definitely had the money. He made me work for him. I started the summer between first and second grade. I got $1 a day.

@Musicman I worked my butt off doing chores around the house and in the yard. If I hadn’t probably wouldn’t have gotten a penny.

@Musicman My earliest memories are $0.24 cheeseburgers and $0.19 hamburgers with $0.19 fries, maybe about 4 years old in 1974, those cheeseburgers looked huge to my four year old self.

@Musicman are you glad he made you work because school doesn’t pay unless you’re doing an apprenticeship

@cherokeepatti You know what it's like then.

@Monalisasmith86 It was good that he worked $1 a day at the age of five, at a housing construction site? You never know when to shut up, do you.

@NativePortlander1970 back in his day $1 a day would be equivalent to $100 today

@Monalisasmith86 At the time I wasn't too happy about it. When you are six years old and working every day during the summer it isn't fun. We would come home at night and I would listen to my friends tell me what they did that day. Some days it wasn't much. Other days I really wished I had been there with them. By the time I was 12 I paid for pretty much everything in my life. In the end he did teach me a trade that put money in my pocket and bought me a house.

Yes I’m sure it was difficult but you learned something valuable @Musicman

@Musicman the irony was that he would spend a lot of money on alcohol and cigarettes daily yet deny us cheap treats

@cherokeepatti I am so sorry to hear that 😥