Bill Bryson

But then most things in Des Moines in the 1950s were the best of their
type.  We had the smoothest, most mouth-pleasing banana cream pie at
the Toddle House and I'm told the same could be said of the cheesecake
at Johnny and Kay's ...  Well actually, who could say if they were the
best of their kind?  To know that, you'd have had to visit thousands
of other towns and cities across the nation and tasted all their ice
cream and chocolate pie and so on because every place was different
then.  That was the glory of living in a world that was still largely
free of global chains.  Every community was special and nowhere was
like everywhere else.  If our commercial enterprises in Des Moines
weren't the best, they were at least ours.  At the very least, they
all had things about them that made them interesting and different.
(And they were the best).

    --  The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
             Bill Bryson (2006)

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It's an inevitable consequence of greater efficiency and continuous
amalgamation.  Increasingly the old farms clump together into
super-farms of three thousand acres or more.  By the middle of the
present century, it is thought, the number of farms in Iowa could drop
to as low as ten thousand. ... Without a critical mass of farmers,
most small towns in Iowa have pretty well died.  Drive anywhere in the
state these days and what you see are empty towns, empty roads,
collapsing barns, boarded farm-houses.  Everywhere you go it looks as
if you have just missed a terrible contagion, which in a sense I
suppose you have.  It's the same story in Illinois, Kansas, and
Missouri, and even worse in Nebraska and the Dakotas.  Wherever there
were once small towns, there are now empty main streets.

    --  The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
             Bill Bryson (2006)

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The strippers' tent had the brightest lights and most pulsating music.
From time to time the barker would bring out some of the girls,
chastely robed, and parade them around a little open-air stage while
suggesting -- and looking each of us straight in the eye -- that these
girls could conceive of no greater satisfaction in life than to share
their natural bounties with an audience of appreciative, red-blooded
young men.  They all seemed to be amazingly good-looking -- but then I
*was* running a temperature of over 113 degrees just from the thought
of being on the same planet as young women of such miraculously
obliging virtue, so I might have been a touch delirious.

    --  The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
             Bill Bryson (2006)

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By the closing years of the 1950s most people -- certainly most
middle-class people -- had pretty much everything they had ever
dreamed of, so increasingly there was nothing much to do with their
wealth but buy more and bigger versions of things they didn't truly
require: second cars, lawn tractors, double-width fridges, hi-fis with
bigger speakers and more knobs to twiddle, extra phones and
televisions, room interocoms, gas grills, kitchen gadgets,
snowblowers, you name it.  Having more things of course also meant
having more complexity in one's life, more running costs, more things
to look after, more things to clean, more things to break down.  Women
increasingly wnet out to work to help keep the whole enterprise
afloat.  Soon millions of people were caught in a spiral in which they
worked harder and harder to buy labor-saving devices that they
wouldn't have needed if they hadn't been working so hard in the first
place.  

    --  The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
             Bill Bryson (2006)

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By the 1960s, the average American was producing twice as much
as only fifteen years before.  In theory at least, people could now
afford to work a four-hour day, or two-and-a-half-day week, or
six-month year and still maintain a standard of living equivalent to
that enjoyed by people in 1950 when life was already pretty good --
and arguably, in terms of stress and distraction and sense of urgency,
in many respects much better.  Instead, and almost uniquely among
developed nations, Americans took none of the productivity gains in
additional leisure.  We decided to work and buy and have instead.

    --  The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
             Bill Bryson (2006)