Let's go to Tom's full-paragraph description of the time period of the play:
To begin with, I turn bark time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.
Simply put, the American middle class was uninformed, misled and blind, much, sadly to say, as it is today, blind to the world of big business, money and mortgages that was falling apart around it. They were forced to learn hard lessons in the school of surviving on less and less.
Banks were failing, jobs and incomes were lost, and the future looked bleaker and bleaker. And Tom, Amanda, and Laura, like so many folks in America, and indeed in much of world today, were innocent bystanders of a global economic train wreck. Blind, yes, to forces that were beyond their control yet which ruled their meager everyday lives.
Without jobs or a steady income, people went hungry and even the local grocer, Mr. Garfinkel couldn't really afford to let poor Laura have a stick of butter on credit:
LAURA: ...Butter and what else?
AMANDA: Just butter. Tell them to charge it.
LAURA: Mother, they make such faces when I do that.
AMANDA: Sticks and stones can break our bones, but the expression on Mr. Garfinkel's face won't harm us!
Maybe not, but it is a bitter reminder of how very bad off we are.
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