There’s also prices going the other way. I remember a 1970 add for an RCA TV that was billed as the TV of the new millennium. $2000 would get you this TV. Now you can get TVs orders of magnitudes better for less actual dollars, let alone inflation-adjusted dollars.
I have a vintage print add for a business calculator. It “adds, subtracts, AND mutliplies” (but does not divide) for the wondrously affordable price of $100 in 1970. Which was a good price. And it’s as portable as a typewriter! (note, this is an older version of the ad, with a lower price).
Now they put better calculators and video reproduction in you smart phone as a “freebee”.
On Perry Mason, five-figure sums of money were routinely mentioned and often raised quickly by blackmailees, blown up, offered as bribes, etc. Six-figure amounts also appeared from time to time. They sound plausible to 21st century ears … until you recall that the show was made in the late '50s-early '60s. :eek: The audience back then must have been snarking their TVs with the Mad Men-era equivalent of “First World problems”.
In the opposite direction is availability. Like fresh fruit, especially tropical fruit, such as oranges or bananas. And factory farming making meat, dairy, and grains relatively cheaper.
For instance, one book I remember seeing many prices mentioned is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Scanning through an ebook of that for examples, I see that the main character had a job making $5.00 a week. Elsewhere in the book, she was sent to buy “a quarter loaf of jew rye bread” for 5 cents. So a day’s pay could buy 5 full loaves. I’m not sure exactly what “jew rye” is, but I’m pretty sure even a minimum wage worker today could buy a lot more than 5 loaves of it with a full day’s pay.
So in the 40s-50s, did men always just have a ton of change in their pockets? If a dollar bill was the same as a 10, then a lot of transactions were getting coins back. But then a lot of transactions are using coins, so maybe it evened out.
Between inflation and electronic payment, I hate having change jingling around, and it would drive me crazy if dollars were dimes.
“Did you just order a five-dollar shake? A shake - milk and ice cream. That’s five dollars. You don’t put bourbon in it or nothin’?”
“No, of course we don’t put freakin’ bourbon in it. Five dollars is a hell of a good deal for a milkshake. You can’t even get that price at Baskin-Robbins!”
It’s even more true with computers. The Apple II originally retailed for $2500, which was over $10,000 in current dollars. The earliest hard drives (a whopping 10MB!) sold for $3500 or more; nowadays you can buy a 64GB thumb drive that fits on your keychain and costs lest than 25 bucks.
I do it all the time. When an ex-con on Alfred Hitchcock Presents has (I think) $500 stolen, I have to think “Holy crap! That would be like $5000 today! No wonder he’s pissed off!”
When I worked for the Minnesota Historical Society in the '80s, I spent an afternoon talking to a WWI veteran who converted everything to 20 times more.
I disagree completely with those figures, which are based on a lot of factors that skew them. Like wages, which are pretty close, but prices certainly aren’t. In the 1950s, an unskilled job paid a dollar an hour, which fits the 10x. But a nice family house in a good neighborhood could be rented for $60 a month, and a worker paid (rule of thumb) no more than a quarter of income for housing. A quarter would get you a pack of cigs, a paperback novel, a popular magazine, or a movie ticket. A nickel for a coke, a street car ride, a phone call, a daily paper, a single dip icecream cone. My tuition at a state university was $35 a semester. In 1960 I bought a new Renault for $950, and in 1967, you could still get a Ford Fairlane for less than $2,000…
Similarly, there was a picture of a McDonald’s menu from the 70s that went viral a while ago and I did a check of the prices and as it turns out even if you adjust for inflation McDonald’s is more expensive now than it was back then.
When my mom lived in NYC during the depression, she looked at an apartment on Central Park South. She didn’t take it because she couldn’t afford the $30 rent. Today that building is all multi-milliion-dollar condos.
I don’t usually. You can generally tell from the reactions but sometimes it’s hard to tell. On “The Many Loves of Dobie Gilles”, he will sometimes ask his father for $5 to take a date to a movie and malt shop. His father angrily says no and you are wondering if Dobie is asking for a lot or if Herbert is just super cheap.
You might have had more change. My father didn’t make a lot of transactions (brought his lunch to work, paid for gas with a credit card…AAMCO gas if there was a station around, for some reason that he couldn’t explain to me he favored that brand). But he kept a jar on his bedroom dresser filled with change. You can sometimes read accounts by people talking about change under sofa cushions. After Marx wrote about how he and his mother would go through the pockets of Groucho’s coats in the closet to get change.
I re-watched The French Connection and amid all the action and intrigue Popeye walked over to a street vendor and after seeing the menu sign all I could think was “Wow, pretzels were only 10¢ each!”
But living standards have risen considerably. That’s something you have to take into account. That family had no computer, no microwave, probably only one phone for the house, one car, (and that car was both very unreliable and very unsafe by today’s standards), no air conditioning, if they had a TV there was only one small one, and the house itself was probably smaller and less well insulated.
Going back to the OP, I can often estimate the current equivalent of prices mentioned. However, I vastly prefer the (unfortunately rare) practice of putting the price into a context that’s easily and immediately understandable.
For example:
Son-- “The body shop called, and the damage to the car will cost $100 to fix.”
Father-- “What! I make $50 a week, and they want twice that for one day’s work? That’s highway robbery!”
That allows the viewer, regardless of how old the show or movie is, to understand the scene in a way that really thumps the point home. And the beauty of this method is that it doesn’t matter what the official inflation rate is–this affects all viewers equally, regardless of their economic status.
An inflation calculator can help put prices into context for events that predate your memory, but for anything to do with crimes I’d take it with a grain of pickling salt. The calculation will still give you a general idea of purchasing power, but for the cost of a specific criminal transaction it could be way off. 1944 may sadly just be a high water mark for the price of hits.
They weren’t hired to kill him for $50k. That’s what they (the man’s wife and a corrupt insurance agent) expected to collect after they killed him and made it look like an accident.
It’s one of those rare movies where Fred MacMurray plays a real bastard, the other two being The Apartment and The Caine Mutiny. I recommend them all.
I remember when the first top-loading VCRs, which were bigger than a breadbox, cost several hundred dollars. I bought my first VCR second-hand. They came down pretty fast after about five years on the market, though.
The first desktop computers cost more than $1,000, and that was just for the unit, not the monitor, or the keyboard, or any of the other things you had to buy separately.
“Jewish rye bread” is a sort of sourdough rye. Rye bread was uncommon in the US until the immigration of eastern European immigrants, many of whom were Jewish, and ran kosher bakeries. They had bagels, sourdough rye, and desserts that were unfamiliar to gentile Americans, but quickly became popular in the NY met area. Other bakers started offering bagels, rye bread, and other stuff, and sometimes called it “Jewish” this or that, meaning in the same style as the kosher bakeries. “Jewish braid,” or “Jewish egg bread,” if you ever see that in a book, was challah.
Given that bakery bread is usually upwards of $4/ loaf, 5 loaves wouldn’t be a full day’s pay, but it would still set you back a lot. Now we eat Wonder bread for cheap. Back then, most people baked their own bread for cheap.
On the flip side, I still laugh in Aliens when Ripley is being grilled by the Company board and they bemoan the loss of their $42 million spaceship. By way of comparison, an F-15 fighter jet costs $35mil.
Yes, you can handwave it away as an economy where cars cost $50 or maybe we’re so great at making space freighters that they’re practically free (though the board takes pains to note the substantial dollar loss) but it’s still a tin ear moment for me.
Technically, they say $42mil adjusted dollars, but they don’t say adjusted from what. Maybe it had a price tag of $15mil when built 80-100 years ago but the cost of living has gone up.
Not really. I sometimes form a quick rough estimate of what some sum would amount to in present-day money when it’s significant for a plot point of a punch line, but that’s about it.
Also, Sally’s materialistic attitude in A Charlie Brown Christmas is funnier when you consider that, in modern terms, she wants some “fifties and hundreds”.
