• partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Oh oh! I’ve seen this episode! Before the reboot they called it “company scrip”.

    The theme song was a banger too!

    The line “another day older and deeper in debt” from the chorus came from a letter written by Travis’s brother John.[2] This and the line “I owe my soul to the company store” are a reference to the truck system and to debt bondage. Under this scrip system, workers were not paid cash; rather they were paid with non-transferable credit vouchers that could be exchanged only for goods sold at the company store. This made it impossible for workers to store up cash savings. Workers also usually lived in company-owned dormitories or houses, the rent for which was automatically deducted from their pay.