What favorite product of yours has seen the most (or the least) price inflation over the years? The old folks here undoubtedly remember el cheapo gas, c. 25 cents/gallon, but what about other staples?
Doesn’t effect me anymore, but cigarettes went from $1.85 a pack when I started smoking to almost $9.00 when I quit.
I still can’t get used to paying $8.00+ for paperback books. Realistically, it’s probably a bargain compared to CDs or really just about any other form of entertainment, but I remember when they were just a couple of bucks.
Then again, hard drive prices have fallen by a factor of 40,000 or more since I bought my first one.
Yeah. I could buy a carton for about $11 when I first started. Today the cost is $52.
On the flip side… twenty years ago a Super Big Gulp at 7-11 was a dollar. Today one costs $1.50. That’s not a bad increase.
You know though I’ve been buying CDs for 20 years and they’ve always been in the 13-15 range. I can’t get used to books being $8 or more either.
I’ve seen candy bars go from 30 cents or so to over a buck now. Just a few months ago I was getting them for 80 cents, then a couple of weeks ago I bought one for $1.10. Same store, same candy.
I remember chicken wings for 29 cents per pound. Occasionally less. They were the cheapest identifiable body part, except maybe backs and necks, when available.
They went up slowly and then Buffalo Wings became popular and they jumped up higher that drumsticks, sometimes on a par with breasts. They’ve never come down.
What I’ve noticed are portions getting smaller in my favorite restaurants. Or certain pricey ingredients no longer being offered.
I just went to one of my favorite local places, where they have the best crab cakes in town. No, they have the best crab cakes anywhere, ever. I had to channel that old lady from the old Wendy’s commercials, “WHERE’S THE BEEF?” Only I was all, “Where’s the damn crab cake?” The bun was the same, the sides were the same, but the crab cake itself was a good 30% smaller–for the same price of course.
Diet Coke seems to have gotten really expensive lately.
Back in 1982 I purchased an IBM PC with an 8088 CPU, 640K of memory, two 160K floppy disk drives, and an 80-character-per-second dot-matrix printer - for just over $5000.
In December of 2009 I purchased a new computer with a four-core CPU with about a zillion times the processor power of that old 8088, 8 gigabytes of memory, and a terabyte disk drive for just over $1000. Oh, and a CD/DVD read-write drive whose technology didn’t exist back then. I could have purchased a fancy-pants photo-quality inkjet printer for another $50, but I didn’t need one.
When I first started buying sf books, some were 0.35, most were .50, and a big fat one like Dune was 95 cents. Magazines were 60 cents, not $5. Comics were ten cents - what a scandal when they went up to 12, and the first Superman annual was a quarter.
When I was in high school and started going to Korvettes to buy shirts they were $6 - $8. To this day I have sticker shock when they are more. My Pinto was $2800, I think, and our first house, 3 br in a good neighborhood, was $40K.
cheap!
When we visited Grandpa, he’d often give us kids each a quarter to get an ice cream cone at Baskin-Robbins. I don’t even know how much they cost nowadays, but it’s many times that.
Not to be confused with a typical price, but when I was a kid, the place to go for a cone was Newberry’s. Each scoop (which was cylindrical due to their push-to-fill, squeeze-handle-to-extrude scoopers) was 5 cents. It was low enough quality ice cream that you usually got more than a few ice crystals in it, but kids go for quantity over quality. It was the cheapest cone in town.
I buy the same items at the grocery store over and over, so I notice small price increases in lots of things. Like Little Debbie Snack cakes used to be 99 cents, then the price crept up 10 cents at a time, till today they’re $1.49. A pack of gum, $1.59! Coke, chips, and Doritos are all over the place, though. Sometimes chips are $1.99 at one place, double that at another. Coke has been an average of $1.59 for 2 liter bottles as long as I can remember - if the price of Coke has gone up, we are all in big trouble!
Let’s see. Comics were 10c, newspapers and first class postage 3c, magazines usually 25c and paperback books were 25-35c. I paid $2 for a used calculus book and it had everything that the current $100+ models do (except useless four-color illustrations). Trolley fare was 7.5c (but bus fare was 10c). Saturday matinee movies were 10c too. For that we got a newsreel, two or three cartoons, a serial (cliff-hanger sort) and a feature movie (and no ads). On the other hand, the cheapest computer cost at least $1,000,000 and needed a small power station to run it. You could buy a Chevy for around $2000, but it was garbage compared to the cars built today. Gas was 25c/gal and cigarettes were 25c a pack. You could see a ball game in general admission (which included almost all the seats) for $1.30 of which 30c was tax. My parents bought a very nice house in the suburbs for $7500 in 1945. On the other hand $100/week was very good pay for a working man. Plenty of men were making only $50 (and women making $35 were common). A visit to the doctor’s was $3, but his bag of tricks was very limited (but the use of antibiotics was about to take off). A night in the hospital, when I lost my appendix in 1950 cost only $8.
Those were not the days.
A Mars bar used to be 20p when I went to the sweet shop on the way to school. Now they’re about 50p.
When I first started going to the pub at the age of 16… er, I mean 18, officer… I could buy a round of four pints for a fiver. Now a pint is the best part of three quid.
I can give you an exactly vertical example time wise. In grad school at UCLA, from 1982 - 84, I used to buy coffee for twenty-five cents and a buttermilk pastry for ten cents at the Kerckhoff Coffee House. At least, that’s what I seem to remember but it seems absurdly low even for then, but I’m sure I’m not off by any more than a dime for either item.
I still stop by occasionally on my way to or from the library, and now the coffee’s around $1.50, and the pastry is at least half a dollar.
I don’t buy them anymore but baseball cards. When I started collecting them, a pack was 20 cents. Now of course the damn things are something like $2.50 a pack.
Of things that I buy today I think ground beef sticks out. When I was in college, I would buy a pound normally for 99 cents for 80/20. Now I think its around $3.00.
On the reverse, airline tickets really haven’t moved that much. Twenty+ years ago, after I graduated high school, I decided to go to Europe with some of my vast minimum wage fortune. Buying months in advance and calling around for deals, a round trip ticket to Paris ran me $600. My mom called me last night about going to Paris. The flights were about $800 for a ticket leaving next week.
Of course, if you are a really smart shopper, you can really beat inflation. Philly to Berlin for $375 all in - 2007. Philly - Madrid - $213 round trip - 2008.
When I was in first grade, candy bars were a nickel. For a dime, you could get a Baby Ruth or Butterfinger so big you could hardly eat it in one sitting. Cokes were a dime, and came in glass bottles. That would have been circa 1971, back when the world was black and white. We didn’t get worldwide color until the 80s.
When I was in college, mid-80s, you could get 2 liters for .89 most of the time, sometimes you could find them for .79 on sale.
The school paper ran Burger King coupons. 2 Whoppers, 2 Fries for 2 Bucks.
I still remember $2.50 matinees.
Not a product but when I graduated in 2001 I was choosing between two schools. I was leaning towards the cheaper one and the fact that the estimated cost was $14,000 a year versus the other school at $23,000 a year just sealed it. My Alma Mater is now pushing $23K a year…in less than a decade.
I used to sell Girl Scout cookies when I was a kid (I know, not a staple). When I first started selling them, they were $1.50 a box. Now it’s about $4.00.