I remember those days! I'll never forget the first time that situation happened to me. I was 16 years old and working some crappy restaurant job (dishwasher) for something like $2.65 an hour on my summer vacation. The first few weeks I put in about 35 hours a week but about a month into it, I pulled an extra shift and worked something like 42 or 43 hours. All that week, I looked forward to getting that "big check" and was already mentally spending the extra money. Well to my utter horror, I discovered that my take home pay for those extra hours was about the same as when I was working 35 hours. Bracket creep! Thank you Jimmy Carter.
My grandmother (who is still alive but in a nursing home with Alzheimers) was born in 1909. She used to tell me stories about growing up in Alabama where seeing an automobile was a big deal. There were no paved roads within 50 miles of the family farm all the way up to the 1930s. She never even saw an airplane until the 1920s. One time during that decades, some "barnstormers" came into the area and the whole town shut down for the day, it was that big of a deal.
Some of my earliest childhood memories were of that farm in Alabama. I remember seeing my grandmother pulling water from the well to "pour a bath" (there was no indoor plumbing until 1969) and seeing her grab a chicken from the yard for dinner. She just cracked the neck with her bare hands and dressed it on the spot. She always slept with a loaded rifle under her bed too. She was a tough woman and took no crap from anybody! Kind of like the "granny" from the Beverly Hillbillies.