I know salt used to be expensive, and at one point in time, plastics were dear instead of cheap. What’s the most dramatic examples of goods that underwent riches to rags?
In Australia at least, chicken used to be a luxury. My mother’s generation had it only for Christmas dinner. My generation had it a bit - but not a lot - more often. We’d eat lamb instead, because it was cheap.
The two meats have now become reversed.
The printed word? - that we can design and print a page ourselves, on our desktops - costing pennies - is quite exotic and special, when you consider how difficult and expensive printing has been in the past (even though it was invented as a cheaper alternative to copying by hand).
An Aluminum can.
Aluminum was a precious metal when it was first purified. That rapidly changed, of course.
Computer memory springs to mind. I can recall spending $100 for 512K of video memory so I could display more colors on my screen. Mainboard memory ran about $35 for each 256K SIMM. But recently, I spent maybe $55 to upgrade a computer to 2GB of RAM.
Hard drives, same thing. I remember lusting after a 105 MB hard drive, wishing I had the $370 to get it. A few weeks ago, I put a 340 GB drive in a computer for around $50.
I remeber my father buying one of the first Texas Instruments desktop calculators (something like this), for something like $100 in the early 70s.
Aluminum used to be really expensive, not becuase of rarity (it is the most abundant metal in the earth’s crust), but because it takes enormous amounts of energy to separate it from bauxite, owing to it’s high reactivity. I believe Queen Victoria was given an aluminum punchbowl as a wedding (maybe coronation) gift.
Edit: Beowulff beat me to it.
Aluminum - Wiki cite. Once as valuable as silver, now we use aluminum foil once and throw it away.
Radios.
Used to be a big old box made of wood in the corner that you took out a loan to get.
The other day I counted how many I own, and only two of them have the primary purpose of being a radio.
Cellphone
Shortwave radio
iPal
Creative MP3 player
Car
Corporate freebie mini radio (primary purpose: branding)
Probably a bunch more but I don’t even notice they’re there.
And now radio over digital TV and the internet
Laser printers used to be pretty expensive. I don’t know how much the IBM 3800 went for, but I’m sure it was more expensive than a bottom of the line HP laser printer. I guess you could say the same thing about any computer technology. The ENIAC cost $400,000 in 1946 and had less power than the microprocessor in a gift card. IBM leased the 350 Disk File (capacity 4.4MB) for a $35,000 annual fee.
Long distance communication. Phone calls are cheap, email is pennies.
Dyestuffs. Certain colors were reserved for certain uses because of the rarity and expense of the dyestuff. Now we have cheap, mass produced dyes for every color imaginable.
Paper.
Wax.
Spices. The motherload. The Age of Exploration was kicked off because the incredibly expensive and risky proposition of outfitting a ship and sailing clear around the world could pay off the costs several times over if (big IF) you managed to return home with a load of spices. Lots of people died for peppercorns and cinnamon. Now we put a stick of cinnamon in a drink and throw it out afterwards.
Some make hats with it!
Pigments.
Tyrian purple used to be called “Royal Purple” for it’s cost and rarity. And Lapis Lazuli was once so precious that artists working on commision would save whatever traces of it they could rinse out of their brushes. The whole point of Christmas decorations used to be that midwinter was so drab and grey that people would seek out evergreens and red winter berries like holly, mistletoe and fir trees to brighten things up.
Cheap brilliant chemical dyes are a modern miracle by previous standards.
Fruits and vegetables. Remember when getting an orange at Christmas was a big deal? Until refrigerated trucks came along, fruits and vegetable were out of season for many months of the year, and even expensive in season.
In the 1880’s amethyst stones (purple quartz) were as costly as diamonds. then huge deposits were found in Minas Gerais (Brazil). Within a few years amethysts were cheap-today, maybe $10/karat for exceptional stones.
Sewing needles
Good blades for just about any cutting application
Opal … still precious and beautiful.
Chocolate
Gelatin. Much like aluminum, the extraction (or rather, conversion) of it used to be a huge time-consuming process, reserved for the hoity toity elite. Now it’s trailer trash desert and the stuff of Lutheran potlucks.
Similarly, ice cream/fruit ices. When you had to send a runner 60 miles into the mountains for snow, only royalty and nobility had frozen deserts.
In certain parts of Asia, white rice. My dad likes to tell me how white rice was always a treat, and how poor people ate barley instead. Nowadays it’s the other way around.