I remember hearing from my mother about how her grandmother (my great grandmother) got her chinaset. It was during the great depression, and some flour companie

I remember hearing from my mother about how her grandmother (my great grandmother) got her chinaset. It was during the great depression, and some flour companies held long running promotions where a piece of China would be placed inside the bag of flour. If you ended up with too many pieces of one type (for example tea cups), you could trade with your neigbors to equal out your set. It was a way of buying/owning something nice when you barely had money to pay for the food itself. I'm not sure how apocryphal this story is though. Could the China really have survived transport that way? Maybe the purchaser redeemed the China piece another way. They would also use the bag the flour came in as material to make underwear. Literally nothing was wasted. That is probably also why this stuff got passed down to our generation: they couldn't bear to part with anything.