Those CPI rates used to measure inflation do not account for the way many people respond to price increases nor do they account for improvements in product capability. I have been keeping records of my expenses for over 20 years, and total expenses have been increasing about 1% per year, which is quite a bit less than reported inflation rates, even though my standard of living has improved.
Quite a few goods are sold at adjusted price points, not simple multiples of manufacturing cost or retail cost in an earlier era. There was a time you couldn’t get more than $50 for a baby stroller, no matter how it was made or how rich you were. Then Peg Perego(?) came along and marketed a $300 model everyone just hadda hadda have, opening the market ceiling. OTOH, people simply won’t pay more than pocket change for a soda, no matter what era we’re in.
Just to nail in this point again, food is way cheaper in the US (adjusted for inflation) than it has ever been in history. Sure, ‘organic’ anything will be pricier than other stuff, but we’re paying less for more calories than at any other point in our history. Not only that, but we’re spending less on food, as a percentage of our income, than just about any other country on the planet.
And this is reflected in the percentage of our income we spend on food (see Table 7). We were spending around 16% of our income on food in the early '60s. Now, we’re only spending 10% of our income on food.
So, toys are cheaper. Food is cheaper. Cars are not. Houses are not. And cell phones are infinitely more expensive than they were in the '60s, as is high speed internet access and cable television.
I have dozens of Popular Electronics catalogs from the 1960s. Great bathroom reading. 
The price of stuff back then was staggering. FM radios for $150, color TVs for $700, etc. With inflation taken in to account, the price of electronic stuff back then was much higher than today. Electronic components and modules were also very expensive… vacuum tubes for $10 and up, tuner assemblies for $30. Lowly resistors were around 50 cents each. Heck, you can get better resistors today for less money.
Somewhat off-topic, but this brings up one of my pet peeves: old people waxing nostalgic about old-timey prices, but not taking increasing salaries into consideration. “Everything was so much cheaper back when I was young! You could get a meal at a fine steakhouse for a dollar! I bought a new '55 Plymouth for $1500! Gasoline was 15 cents a gallon! I don’t know how anyone can afford a car now.” Well, Gertie, if everything was so extraordinarily cheap in the good ol’ days, why didn’t people own a different car for every day of the week, or gorge themselves on restaurant meals every day?"
Excellent point.
Even with the high cost of fuel, I have read it is cheaper to operate a vehicle today - on a per-miles basis - than at any time in the past.
If you find the CPI-numbers unsatisfactory, have you tried comparing how large a percentage of household income those prices were, and how a similar toy would cut into your other expenses today? I’d be very surprised if they didn’t paint a much more extreme picture.
An apples-to-apples comparison for toys might not be possible because of changes in materials and workmanship. The $105 American Girl doll mentioned earlier is still a mass-produced (albeit well-made) plastic toy. A hundred years ago, a celluloid doll would have been the equivalent in terms of mass production, but the quality and durability would have been poorer. (It would also be far too flammable to be sold today.) A hundred years before that, a little girl’s dream doll might have been made of kid and bisque with real hair. It also would have been entirely hand-made with great attention to detail. These days, dolls made with those materials and methods are considered to be adult collectors’ items. Even adjusting for inflation, it’s impossible to compare the prices of such different articles.
Sure, but look at everything we’ve given up. Try to find some LSD or god forbid, some old fashioned dope (opium), and people look at you like you just walked out of a steam punk convention in full costume (and character). Don’t waste your breath mentioning the century or so between the periods. If it walks like a geezer and talks like a geezer . . .
Maybe things are better in this arena too, though I’m dubious. They’re certainly less colorful. I can remember seeing Tim Leary talk at my college and tripping so hard you could almost see how the spacetime in his immediate vicinity was being distorted. Of course a lot of people’s shit was also distorted, but who cares. It was like, totally cosmic man. Where are you going to get totally cosmic now - unless it comes with a complete set of guide books and a clothing line?
Huh? :dubious: 
Indeed, if you think about it, whatever happened to TV repairmen? There used to be all kinds of guys whose full job job was fixing TVs. Now there isn’t.
But if you think about the economics of it, it made sense, in 1965, to have TV repairmen. At the time, a nice color TV of 20-24" would cost you $500 or so - about ten percent of your annual net income. Something like that breaks down, you damn well try to fix it. Replacing it was an enormous outlay of cash. In “Back to the Future,” when Marty mentions to his 1955 family that he has two TVs, they dismiss it as a joke, because of course no normal family could afford such a preposterous luxury. Such an expensive appliance would have to be repaired if it broke, 'cause you sure didn’t want to fork out the bux for another.
Today, I can walk into a Best Buy and buy a state of the art, name brand 42" TV, about three times the picture area of the 1965 TV, for $429 - which in Canada is what a person on minimum wage will make in seven days, and a person with an average income will make in three days. After deductions. You aren’t going to pay someone to fix something if the price of the repair might approach the price of just buying a new one.
Sorry. I really don’t do the Ginsberg, stream of consciousness thing very well. Although I suppose if you’d seen the evolution of pop culture from my somewhat jaundiced perspective, it might have resonated. Eh.
That was mainly all said tongue in cheek but there was a little truth. People coming of age will always push boundaries and want to explore. It just feels now like you have marketing and R&D depts devoted to the “experience.”
And I don’t necessarily think that illegal and often dangerous chemicals are a necessary part of the process. Too many people took that off-ramp to nowhere to try to justify some truly crazy ass shit like that. But for those of us who survived, it was an integral part of it and for many, shaped us in lasting and I believe (hope) positive ways. [shrug]
No kidding. I was born in 1960 and through high school walking home from school there was always at least 1 house with a TV repair truck there. Went well with the zillions of TV antennas polluting the sky-view.
But back to my OP. So in '60 was $14.99 a big hit to the average middle class household to spend on a toy for their kid?
Well, according to this, the median family income in 1960 was $5600 per year. The median household income today is about $50K. So take that into consideration. Using the cost of the toy as a percentage of household income, that $14.99 toy would be like $133 today. Using the inflation calculator, I get $114.62. Whether that is a “big hit” to the average middle class household depends on how you personally define it. I would call it a non-insignificant amount of money for a toy.
Or, to tie it together with an earlier comment, about the same amount as an American Girl doll. Which, for a middle-class family, would be a pretty decent birthday present but not something you buy monthly.
You could argue that cell phones are infinitely more expensive, but communication, the meaningful thing to compare, is not.
This PDF says the average cost of touch-tone service in 1987 was $17.70. For that, you got unlimited local calls on your home phone (a.k.a. you had to be in your kitchen). The inflation calculator in OP translates that to ~$36 in 2012 dollars.
The very first cheap cell carrier I thought of has a plan for unlimited US calls + voicemail + caller ID + unlimited text for $35. And you can use it almost anywhere.
Most households, especially led by those in younger generations, are ditching landline phone service for this reason.
I think it’s pretty clear that toys were more expensive back in the day.
Here’s the Death Star toy available in the Sears catalog in 1978 for $17.87:
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That’s a pretty neat toy, but I doubt it would cost the inflation-adjusted $62.04 today.
I remember that I wanted a $16 (IIRC) toy for my birthday in 1978: the Micronauts Giant Acroyear:
My parents perceived it as pricey, and it seemed like a substantial present. Again, awesome toy, but today I don’t think it would go for $60+.
For comparison, here is a Batman playset, approximately the same size, does a bit more, perhaps, with flashing lights and sounds, and costs $55.
I suspect, like with many other things, we tend to go for quantity these days. Individual toys are generally less expensive, but we buy more of them, or buy a select few very expensive items like iPhones or game consoles that had no real equivalent in days of yore.
I’ll go the other way -
When we moved cities in 1962, my dad spent $10 each for me and my brother for new toys, since we left most of our stuff behind. (Moving was expensive back then too!)
I doubt you could buy a substantial arsenal of toys for $100 nowadays. (Although I have not had the occasion to try buying anything for a while…)
The quality and range of toys has changed - for the better - since then too. And the type of toy… Do they even make those green plastic soldiers for anything other than Toy Story movie tie-ins nowadays? Let alone the cowboy-and-indians plastic toy set… Girder-and-Panel sets came and went fairly quickly.
Toys seem to suffer from the same problem as grown-ups’ toys. There are so many more and the complexity is greater. We spend less on our basics - food, clothing - so that we can spend our disposable income on an array of adult toys (not those kind!) like iPods, flatscreen TVs, DVDs and players, computers, iPads, not to mention services like cable TV and cellphones, and internet - expenses that are pretty much “must have” today but did not exist back then.
You bet they do, my son has a couple of different sets of Hutts*. He also scored a small doll house, that is now known as the Hutt House. They also make quite nice replacement board game pieces.
Suckers are cheap as dirt too, you can pick up a bag for a couple of bucks.
*Makes sense when you thing of soldiers going Hut! Hut! Hut! all over the place.