…I will almost always go to an inflation calculator to see what the value is in today’s dollars. Am I the only one who does this?
Not really. What difference does it make?
(And I use the inflation calculator a lot, but not for fiction.)
It doesn’t really. More a curiosity. I thought it might be weird and it’s looking like I was right 
You’re better than me. Sometimes when I watch an old show or movie, I look online to see which cast members are still alive.
I don’t, but whenever a scene in a diner shows posted prices I’m always comparison shopping, “Two eggs, bacon, toast and coffee for $1.25! That’s a bargain.”
I used to do it with Mad Men since it was interesting to see what people’s salaries would translate to and to see if, say, Peggy making X salary was itself historically significant (“She’s a young single woman in 1966 getting paid $80,000!”). I can’t remember doing so for other shows.
For most of the 20th century, I already have a good idea what it buys in today’s money, because I’ve been doing that most of my life. But yes! Older or foreign prices still trigger it.
Isn’t this the reason you often get people writing down a number on a piece of paper and not showing it to the audience? So when the guy goes “whew, that’s steep. Sure you didn’t accidentally add an extra few zeroes?” and it turns out he owes the mobster $100! :eek:, people won’t laugh during the serious parts.
Because it helps get the point of a scene.
in It’s a Wonderful Life, Uncle Billy loses $8000. Now I have more than $8000 in the bank, so if I were stupid I might say, what’s the big deal? But I’m not, so I look in the inflation calculator and see he lost the equivalent of nearly $100K! That’s some serious scratch! And the reaction of George makes more sense.
Likewise, a cattleman in a western might be carrying $20K to buy cattle. Doesn’t seem a lot until you look at the conversion and see that’s like half a million 2017 bucks. Then I wonder if the movie was doing inflation for the audience, or whether cattlemen routinely carried that much moolah.
In Double Indemnity they kill the husband for $50K. I wouldn’t even get out of bed for $50K, let alone murder anyone. But nearly $700K? Maybe…maybe…
I have an approximate conversion rate in my head. About X10 for the early 70s, X15 for the 50s, X20 for depression era.
I also don’t have any problen with foreign prices, since I collected stamps in the 50s, so I knew the values of the common stamps were equal to about 3-5 cents.
Oh yes, all the time. Shows and also books.
My favorite is when the price is for something that was highly priced at that time, and would now be much more affordable, relatively speaking. Like someone being so rich they could buy a deluxe microwave in 1980.
A good comical treatment of this is the Austin Powers movies, in which villain Doctor Evil is cryogenically frozen in 1967, emerges in 1997, and tries to resume his international-blackmail schemes, to find that the once-dramatic-seeming demand of one million dollars is now considered trivial, so he hastily amends it to a more serious $100 billion. In a later film, he time-travels back to 1969 and makes a $100 billion demand, to get laughed at because the amount is so absurdly large.
One time I can recall using an inflation calculator was to gauge the $1 million random demanded by the hijackers in the 1973 novel (and 1974 film) The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. It’d be worth about $5 million now, not a bad hunk of change, even divided between the hijackers. The 2009 film updated the random demand to $10 million, but the result was that the cash filled a suitcase about the size of a baby grand piano, with the comical limitations this imposed.
Pretty far off–it is 6.28x for 1970, 10.11x for 1950, and 14.59x for 1930. (The furtherest that counter goes back is 1913, where it is 24.61x.)
Not often but I do check on things once in a while.
E.g., I recently saw some ads in an old newspaper for early TVs.
E.g., a giant screen (21") Admiral TV “home theater” TV. (Phonograph, AM radio.) $400. 1955.
About $3,600 in today’s money.
Plus, in that town, you needed cable TV. $150 to join the co-op (if the line goes down your street) and $3 a month fee. For one channel. Maybe get a second channel later. And you guys complain about Comcast.
In terms of old reruns of TV shows, it’s important to appreciate how much money something like $400 dollars that gets lost or stolen was 50-60 years ago.
I don’t always look up things like that, but I do sometimes. One of the [del]best[/del] worst things about carrying a smart phone all the time is that I [del]don’t have to[/del] am physically unable to let trivial things go unverified.
The last time I remember rushing to the CPI Calculator was when I was watching Mad Men and they mentioned Don’s salary. This would have been the first or second season. I think it was something like $250,000 in today’s money.
I don’t look them up, but I find them interesting. I always check out the price signs in the window of the grocery store on the Andy Griffith Show (I think eggs are 19 cents).
Also, there is a Dragnet episode where Joe Friday, in voiceover, says while driving through a ritzy part of LA, “some of these homes are worth upwards of $100,000”.
mmm
And the TV was probably black-and-white and the phonograph was mono. There were very few color TV manufacturers in 1955 and very few shows broadcast in color and stereos were considered to be something for hobbyists to put together instead of coming fully assembled.
If official government inflation figures can be believed.
I used to work in the marketing department for a furniture company. Framed on one wall was an ad from before WWI, in which you could buy a bedroom suite for under $20.
A lot of times the inflation calculator doesn’t really help because inflation has skyrocketed in other ways. There was an episode of All in the Family ca. 1971-1972 in which Archie says his house is probably worth $20,000, though he asks a shady blockbuster for $35,000 because it’s a figure so exaggerated he knows the man won’t offer it (which of course he does). Those figures translate to between $120K and $210K in 2017 USD, and remember that the $120K figure is the one much closer to reasonable and the latter is unreasonable. My understanding is that not even in Queens could you touch a 2 BR rowhouse in decent condition for $120K today. Would this be correct?
Archie’s salary as a loading dock foreman, given in another episode, is $5.50 per hour, which would work out to approximately $33 now and around $66k per year, which might be closer to home than the real estate cost.
The episode where Michael inherits (quick google) $275 and donates it to McGovern would be about $1700 today. That was one episode where I thought Archie was justified in wanting to kick Mike’s whiny behind, incidentally- he DID owe that money to Archie, both financially and morally, and even if he didn’t want to give it to him he should have banked it for himself and his wife as savings.
Most of the movies I watch are from the 30s and 40s, so this is something I encounter often. It really makes a difference in the plot development.