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Dave-the-Flamingo t1_it7e960 wrote

Apparently people would pawn of their Sunday Best and then buy it back at the end of the week to go to church.

https://visitvictorianengland.com/2019/05/24/victorian-pawnbrokers/

“For the majority of the working classes, pawning was simply a way of life. The only way to make ends meet was to pledge their belongings to raise cash for the week ahead. When in work, they used their clothing, especially their Sunday best, as capital. This was why Saturdays and Mondays were the pawnbrokers’ busiest days. Clothing was frequently pledged on a Monday and redeemed on a Saturday after the breadwinner of the family had been paid. It was worn to chapel or church on a Sunday, and pledged again the next day. This cycle of pledging and redeeming, week in, week out, might continue for years, and pawnbrokers made their profits on the interest charged”

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sauveterrian t1_it7ti07 wrote

My Nana used to pawn my Grandad's suit to get the family to pay-day. This was very common in poor families in the 1940's.

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pkgary t1_it86nlk wrote

Excuse me if Im confused, but isnt this a bad thing? Im understanding it as the same concept as a payday loan? Why continuously pawn the same thing every week and buy it back for more, instead of just saving enough for a weeks expenses? If they cant afford to do that then it doesnt make sense for them to buy it back at all right?

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Dave-the-Flamingo t1_it88stu wrote

You understand perfectly and it is a terrible thing that unfortunately still exists today in the form of payday loans. This is the brutal cost of being poor. They could have slipped into the cycle of pawning clothes, because they had a week/day without wages and then I imagine it is very hard to get out of. Not sure why they didn’t just not buy the clothes back. Perhaps they just still wanted to be part of the community or perhaps they truly believed that the afterlife was a better option for them so attending church was the best security for a good life after the bad one they are in!

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pkgary t1_it8anql wrote

That's definitely a good point. In the same way you see people spending way too much on car payments for vanity, I'm sure the thought of showing up to church and having everybody in the community clearly see that you cant afford Sunday clothes anymore (when you did before) would be crushing enough to make people enter that cycle of pawning.

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Sunshinetrooper87 t1_it9r6i2 wrote

Culturally you wore your Sunday best, you kept up with the Joneses.

Quote from Pratchett is useful here:

"He could here his granny speaking.  ‘No one’s too poor to buy soap.’  Of course, many people were.  But in Cockbill Street they bought soap just the same.  The table might not have any food on it but by gods, it was well scrubbed. That was Cockbill Street, where what you mainly ate was your pride."

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blindeey t1_itait2w wrote

I would've said the Boots quote. Which I haven't really read Pratchett but seen it floating around:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two
and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could
afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

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