At that time, the overall cash supply was a lot smaller relative to the GNP than it is today. There just wasn’t that much cash around. This was a HUGE political issue at the time. The populist movement was getting started around that time, and their big issue was the tight money supply and its effect on midwestern farmers. Remember William Jennings Bryan and his Cross of Gold speech in 1896?
The Ingalls family didn’t see much cash. Even in later years when they were more prosperous, they used relatively less cash than we would today. (I haven’t read the books in ages, so I’ll talk in terms of the TV show.) Ma would sell eggs to Mr. Olsen’s store, and buy goods there. He gave her credit for the eggs, not cash. She would then “spend” the credit in the store. This seems like a decent enough arrangement until you consider that by taking credit rather than cash, Ma was locked into shopping only at the Olsen’s store. There wasn’t any place else to shop in Walnut Grove, of course, but if she had had some cash, she could have taken it on her occasional trips to Mankato, and bought at Kato-Mart, which had much lower prices and a bigger selection.
In light of that situation, the role of Mrs. Olsen changes dramatically. She was portrayed as an overbearing greedy busybody, but she was basically played for a laugh. But considering that she was in charge of the only store in town, she becomes significantly less benign. Would someone like her have inflated prices? Certainly. Sold inferior goods for premium prices? Of course. Refused to let people return defective items? Yup. Many story lines on the show focused on her conflicts with her husband, who was basically a decent guy, but quite a wimp. He tried to deal fairly with the Ingalls family and other townspeople, and she would step in and try to work things to the store’s advantage. On the show, the fair and the good always won out, but in real life? I doubt it. Think of what it would have been like to have to shop with the real Mrs. Olsen. It would have been a real problem. And the limited cash flow prevented people from taking their money elsewhere. It also meant that a new store was unlikely to open. An established store run by a prosperous family could afford to let people buy on credit. It would be a lot harder for a start-up to do that.
So, to make a long story short, the “value” of the shiny penny was far more than its actual buying power, especially in 1870, when the Ingalls were much poorer than they were in the Walnut Grove years. It represented the very rare opportunity for the girls to have some actual buying power of their own.
I remember the passage in Gone with the Wind when Rhett gives Wade a bill to go buy “lots of candy. Enough to give yourself a stomachache.” The half million Rhett made in the blockage would be about 7 million today, except it was all in gold.
I just re-read Dracula (1897) and was tickled to note where someone gave a penny to a child to go buy a loaf of bread “…and keep the change”! Going by this, I’d make a penny about $5 today.
I never watched LHotP regularly, or much at all for that matter. However, I do remember one episode where the family goes to a fair/ carnival sort of thing. Pa gave at least 2 of the kids quarters.
Well, in On the Banks of Plum Creek we learn what Laura and Mary spent one of those two pennies on. Not sure if it counts as a spoiler, but what the heck…
After their first day of school ever, Pa gives them a dime to go to the Olesons’ store to buy a slate (aka a mini-chalkboard used as a writing tablet). Alas, they have nothing left over to buy some chalk, which costs a penny. Conscientious Laura & Mary don’t want to ask Pa for even more money. So the kids privately decide that Mary will buy the piece of chalk with her Christmas penny, and from then on Mary will own half of Laura’s penny.
The fate of the other penny is left for historians to ponder.
Other monetary references in the LHoP series:
[spoiler]
A meal in a railroad hotel costs $0.25 (On the Shores of Silver Lake)
In hard times when cats are scarce (and mice are plentiful), a kitten costs $5 (Little Town on the Prairie)
Also in LToP, Laura later earns $1.50 a week as a seamstress, with hours from 7AM - 6PM, and a half-hour for mealtime. Pa says of this workday, “That’s fair. You get off an hour early :eek: but have to bring your own meal.”
For her first teaching stint, Laura earns $25 (+ bed/board) for two months’ work. Later, as a more experienced teacher, she earns about $75 for teaching school for 3 months (These Happy Golden Years)
In THGY, a parlour organ costs the Ingalls $100, $40 of which is Laura’s. The family decides to get the organ as a homecoming gift to Mary, who’s been away at college for the blind.)[/spoiler]
Y’know, I probably should be embarrassed to have this info off the top of my head, but … eh, screw it. Yes, I’m an adult and I read LHoP books once every couple of years!
If you tell your child it is about the same as Santa leaving her a nice shiny Sacky dollar, you’re about on the right track. You could say 50cent piece/half-dollar.
In other words- even then it was more a gesture than a significant sum.
It was $.50 for the kitten. Page 25 of LTotP. Everyone is shocked about how high the price was.
In Farmer Boy Almanzo buys a baby pig for $.50.
I think the ‘getting off half an hour early’ bit was from These Happy Golden Days. In LTotP, Laura makes ‘$.25 a day plus dinner’, which is $1.25 a week.
Dunno about the tv series, but in The Long Winter it’s clear that there’s at least two general stores in town, so Mrs. Oleson doesn’t get to be as horrible as she was apparently made out to be in the show. There’s an argument between a bunch of townsfolk and one of the store owners about what consitutes fair business.
I believe it was about twice as much, but am not sure. Early in this (actually last) century when we still had fixed echange rates the pound was worth $4.80. Since there were 12 pennies to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound, the English penny was worth 1/240 of $4.80 or two cents.
I very much liked Green Bean’s post, but I’d like to add that there were typically social limitations on how stupidly greedy a general store-owner could be, even in the absence of competition. My great-grandfather owned the general store in a very small town in North Dakota - the only town of any size for about 30-40 miles around. If he’d tried to been a real pig, I suspect his neighbors wouldn’t have reacted too kindly - and that could have real consequences if, for example, he’d ever found himself wiped out due to a fire. As it stands, his willingness to engage in barter and credit pretty much did ruin him in the Depression, but I suspect that the reason he did so was about 3-tenths generosity and 7-tenths self-interest (we would hope “enlightened,” but I’m not sure of that)…
Your estimate of 50 cents sounds accurate to me. Replies of 14 cents based on this or that economic statistic are absurd. When I was a child in the early 60’s, I could buy two pieces of “penny candy” for a penny. Those small morsels, if you can find them, would be at least a quarter each today. I would use this reasoning to say your initial estimate is right.
The penny would have been worth $0.50 in the early 1960’s, based on my earlier statement of penny candy when I was a boy.
In the time of Little House in the Prarie, a day’s wage for a skilled workman was roughly $2.50, $15 or more in the early 1960’s. That would make a penny in Laura Ingall’s young days worth about 3 or 4 dollars today.
It’s worth noting that this is a zombie thread from 2005 using values from 2003, so as long as we’re talking about inflation, we should keep in mind that $1 in 2003 dollars are worth roughly $1.25 in 2012 dollars according to a quick google search. And the same search says that $1 in 1870 dollars is worth $17.54 today, so that’s pretty much in match with what they were saying (14*1.25=17.5).
Also, seeing the disputes over how different commodities may fair against those values, different ones change at different rates and all the inflation does it more or less average those.
I don’t know anyone from 1870, but my father worked for a radio store in the mid-20s and he told me that young radio-obsessed men would come in with their $12 pay envelope, take out 60c. for a week’s carfare, another 30c. for a week’s worth of lunches and ask what they could buy for $11.10. They were living at home and not putting anything by for clothes. But you can judge by those numbers that there was a factor of at least 10 between then and now, probably more. Then you have to run that back to 1870, another 50 years. A factor of 50 wouldn’t surprise me at all.
Remember the story of Lincoln walking 6 miles to refund the 2c. he had inadvertently overcharged someone? From my childhood in the 40s, I remember penny candy that cost a penny, mustard pretzels that cost 4 for a nickel (and I checked with my aunt who grew up in the 30s and they were a penny apiece in her day) that now cost at least $1, if not more. Ice cream cones cost 5c., 6c. if you wanted a “sugar cone” (now called a waffle cone). You can’t find them for under $2.50 and that is going back only to the 1940s.
Huckleberry Finn claimed to be paid 10 cents to cross the Mississippi with a farmer to catch a sheep, taking most of a day to do it.
He was actually lying about where he was, and offered that story as a believable claim. The character was about 13 or 14 years old at the time. That would have been around 1845 to 1850.
Mark Twain claimed to be pretty good at confabulation, but little details like that were probably spot on.
Correct. In the 1870’s, earning $1 a day was considered bare minimum for unskilled laborers. Rail workers and ranch hands were considered the McJobs of their era… hard labor that took little training and had no real opportunity for advancement. For example, a cowboy on the trail could expect $1 a day.
In a prosperous mining town like Deadwood or Tombstone, a miner could make $4 a day. However, this did not provide any extra “purchasing power” because the merchants in town just multiplied the price of everything by four.
And that’s what it really boils down to. It’s not possible to make a direct comparison between eras. Back then, “normal” meant a day’s food, a bed to sleep in, and maybe a new shirt every now and then. Today even a low-income person is expected to have a car, television, and cell phone. A lower-class worker today is still far richer than a low-class worker of the day.
It’s better to approximate what a person might get for a penny back then. To answer OP, a child getting a penny for Christmas would likely spend it on a few pieces of candy. Like if I kid today found some quarters and played a video game, or maybe a small bag of M&Ms.