My hubby made me nuts saving bread bags. He still does it although I have a cabinet FULL of plastic bags. But there were no baggies when we were kids and I could just hear his mom telling him that they had to save the bags to keep stuff from drying out.
Speaking of bread bags....remember when the bags were made of wax paper? At my house, they were saved for trips to the park where they were flattened out and used to sit on when going down the metal slides. A couple trips down on the bag and that slide was slick enough to launch you into outer space....or at least into the next county.
When I was about 10 years old I remember that my grandmother would get pile of wood delivered and slid down the coal shoot. It would be my job to pull it into the cellar and stack it neatly in a bin by the furnace. It would take a few hours but I always would get excited to tell her the job was finished, because she would take out her coin purse and usually give me a quarter and a dime. That quarter was enough to get me into a movie which had 3B movies, cartoons, chapters (serials), Three Stooges short or a fat and skinny short. The dime would buy two bars of candy. Today I couldn't Buy a ticket for a movie for less than $14 (seniors prices). The price of candy bars today is over a dollar and they're much smaller than they were when I was young.