VCRs. Our first one - bought in 1984 - was 400 dollars and had a wired remote that could stop and fast-forward the tape and nothing else. We researched VCRs for a month or more before plunking down our tax refund to buy that.
I could get one for 30 dollars now that does more than that.
Oh yeah!
My first job out of school in the early 80s was working with an IBM mainframe. When the company went through budget cuts the following year, one of the first things to be axed was a planned purchase of additional memory for the mainframe. 8 meg. I have more than that on the memory chip in my cell phone, for 20 dollars.
When we bought our first computer (a Mac SE) in 1986, it had no hard drive and you had to have an OS disk to boot it. After a couple of months we spent six hundred dollars on an external hard drive that had 20 meg of storage.
A year ago I bought a 250 gig hard drive for about a hundred dollars. That’s 10,000 times the storage for a sixth of the price.
Plasma balls. When I was a kid, it was a long-harboured ambition to have one of these mysterious objects that cost literally thousands. Now you can buy mini desktop ones for a fiver, and full-size ones for about 20 or 30 pounds.
Then again, that’s true of most home electronics. DVD players and CD players for £20 in supermarkets, etc.
Blue LEDs.
When I was in electronics school, they were rare-to-nonexistent. Later, they cost hundreds of dollars each. Then they got cheap and became a fad. Now they’re passé. 
I recently bought a laser printer for $90, and it included an impressive list of features. I was surprised at how far prices had dropped since the last time I shopped for a printer.
I paid $295 for a basic handheld scientific calculator back in the early 1970s. Something with similar functions would cost about $10 today.
Xerox machines used to be insanely expensive. They were leased on a monthly basis, not sold.
Microwave ovens were very expensive appliances for many years. Today, you can get a basic model for less than $50.
Penicillin used to be far more valuable than gold. Now they put antibiotics in the feed of farm animals.
Clocks, watches, and lasers are all far less expensive than they used to be.
The first transistors cost about $18 a piece in 1951 (over $100 in todays dollars). In the late 60s they were about $1 a piece. If my math and this page are correct, you could get almost 4 million transistors for a dollar in 2002.
Pfff. I remember the 16K RAM extension you could buy so your Timex Sinclair 1000 had more than 2K of RAM.
Virtually anything electronic would fall into this category. The calculator you can buy today for under $10 is far more powerful than the ones you used to have to pay over $100 for. Everything is cheap now compared to when it first came out (CD players, DVD players, digital cameras, etc. etc.).
It used to be, if you actually wanted to buy a movie on videocassette, it would cost you around a hundred dollars.
Fresh fruit, of a type that didn’t grow nearby or was out of season, used to be a real luxury. (I guess Annie Xmas already mentioned this one.)
CD recorders and CDs to record on.
The recorder was in the $4-5 k range and the CDs were about $50 each. This was not that long ago.
Here’s an article from Byte magazine from 1994 that is reviewing CD-ROM recorders:
:eek:
Now, CD-Rs are practically free, and the recorder is not far behind.
Lobsters come to mind. In Nana’s day, she was embarrassed to take lobster sandwiches to school, because it meant her father poor fisherman.
I don’t see that as a problem today.
This was my first laptop and yeah, I paid about $5k in '91. Read the specs and laugh since it died about 14 months old.
Color televisions, until just a couple of decades ago, used to be quite expensive. My parents paid $650 for their first color television in 1973; That’s the equivalent of $3188 in 2008 dollars. In 1976, when I was 10, I bought a 12" portable color television for $220. That’s $839 in 2008 dollars. (And, at 42, I’m having a hard time justifying the possibility of shelling out $600 for a plasma HDTV today.)
Not just laster printers, but color laser printers. I paid $120 for a new Samsung color laser printer a few weeks ago.
Real estate in downtown Detroit.
Isn’t this the opposite of the OP’s question?
The RCA CT-100, the first RCA NTSC color TV, was introduced in 1954 for $1000, about $8000 in today’s dollars, and RCA was taking a hefty loss on each set.
Eyeglasses. I know there was a thread recently bemoaning their cost, but I’m amazed that I can go down the street and get 2 pairs (nice frames, basic but light plastic lenses) for <$70. Compare to my first pair which were >$300 in 1983 or so.
Granulated sugar. IIRC from reading my “pioneer folk” kiddie-lit way back when, refined sugar was a rare treat for only the finest of occasions. Now, the only time people seem to think it’s special is when it’s used to sweeten a soda.
Yes, but that’s only for defensive purposes.
Clothing. Cloth used to be crazily expensive, even into the industrial era. Nowadays you can get inexpensive clothing in any color or style. Of course, hand tailoring of that clothing is crazily expensive, when it used to be cheap.
You read stories even into the 30s and 40s where poor people sell their overcoat to pay for rent and food. How much do you think you could get for a secondhand coat today, and how many minutes of rent would that be?
Cheap prescription glasses came about because the optometrit’s monopoly was broken. I always wondered why glasses cost >$300-till i noticed the optometrist driving a M-B! Now, the discount places give you a very good product at a reasonable price-too bad such monopolies in other areas couldn’t be done away with.
I was thinking about mentioning that. From what I’ve read, cloth was quite expensive, and you never just tossed out something that was made of cloth. Dresses could be made from the cloth bags that flour sacks were made of. When clothing got worn, you’d mend it (and even well-to-do women knew how to stitch up a hole). And when it finally got so worn out that even stitching couldn’t fix it, it went to the “rag man”, who gathered old cloth to sell to paper mills (before wood pulp paper became the norm).
They used to make “darning eggs” to put in socks to hold it in shape while sewing up a hole. Try to convince someone today to stitch a hole in a sock. When you can get six pair for $4, it just ain’t worth the time.
If only Walmart had a “Coffins and funeral arrangements” section!
Glass and glass wares. Now it’s throw-away cheap, but two hundred years ago it was hand-made luxury product. And fitting your home with large glass plate windows would be very costly.
Also mirrors.