J.D. Rockefeller was famous for passing out dimes to plain folk he passed on the street.
How much is that in today’s money?
Assuming 1915, since he did this in retirement (and he generally gave the money only to kids) we arrive at a value of $2.16. This will vary according to the year chosen, but is a fair ballpark figure - there wasn’t much inflation in this period.
Depends on how you calculate it, and the comparisons are always suspect, but say a dollar or two. He did it towards the end of his life, and he lived until 1937. This calculator gives $0.10 in 1937 as $1.50 in today’s money using CPI:
http://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/uscompare/result.php
Oops, take the “result.php” off the end of that URL to get the actual calculator:
http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/
Also note that there was a good deal of inflation during the 1920s, and deflation during the Depression. That gives the 1928 dime as $1.26, and the 1933 dime as $1.66. At any rate, you probably could have bought a loaf of bread with the dime, or a beer, after 1933 when it was legal again.
Nostalgia time: I was a kid in NYC during those times, and everybody seemed to know about him, but I was never lucky enough to encounter ol’ JD. I recall a dime being pretty valuable then, and would have been happy to get one. An ice cream cone or a ride on the subway was only a nickle back then.
In 1970 I could buy 3 beers for $1.66 with change left over at the Pickwick in Greensboro, NC.
My mother got a dime from him when she was a kid in Lakewood, New Jersey.
Any other examples of what a dime could buy back then? I don’t think inflation rates tell the whole story. It’s my understanding that the price of services has risen faster than the price of goods.
Before I made my statement, I took a quick look here, and actually poked around for the price of a beer in 1933:
3 1/3 copies of The New York Times
One pound of bread,five pounds of cobbage or more than a pound of cornmeal.
I’ve never heard of this before. Is it a response to that song “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”
Or, if you sold it to a collector, it could be worth as much as $32.00 , assuming you kept it for 93 years.
If you’re referring to Rockefeller’s practice, he supposedly started it at the behest of Ivy Ledbetter Lee, the PR consultant he hired to rehabilitate the Rockefeller public image in the aftermath of the Ludlow Massacre, and kept on for the remainder of his life. Lee supposedly told him to start carrying pocketfuls of dimes, and hand them out to schoolchildren, making him appear to be a kindly old man rather than a notorious skinflint.
Whoda thunkit?