Everyone I know, aged from their 40s to their 60s washes out ziplocks and has a place to dry them. If the foil isn’t greasy or really gooey from something, that gets washed and dried and reused, as well. My oldest friend is in her 80s, comfortable financially, and she still saves bread bags. Also, we all use and reuse the green or yellow produce bags that absorb ethylene. And we will all rinse and dry paper towels to reuse, if they aren’t really dirty or greasy.
All the folks above are working middle class to upper middle class. Our money goes to taxes, property taxes and energy, so we are frugal where we can be. We also shop devotedly at consignment stores and flea markets and vie for the best find at the lowest price.
We had an ice man when I was young. It was the same man who delivered the milk and orange juice. Real refrigerators were in short supply for awhile after the war. He had a horse-drawn truck and always gave us kids a large chunk of ice in the summer. We had cold drinks: you took an ice pick and chiseled some off the corner of the ice block. The rag man lived along the crick in a shack, had a horse with a hat and we all thought that old nag was a Palomino!
BTW: *sheeny* is slang for Jew.
“BTW: *sheeny* is slang for Jew.”
I had asked my mom about that awhile ago, and she didn’t know why they called him that, so I “googled” it. Something weird about hearing a first-hand story about a horse-drawn wagon and looking up the term on the internet! (My 93-year old mom got frustrated with trying to figure out the internet at two homes - so she gave up!)