Inflation has effected me in several ways. Let me explain my might-not-be-safe-for-work situation, here.
A couple of years ago the air at the gas station nearby used to be free. Now it costs 50 cents to inflate my woman - same gas station, same woman.
(what can I say? Some men prefer a woman who’s intelligent, some prefer a girl with a sense of humor. I prefer a woman to be inflatable)
Lately I’ve been drinking a bit too much beer, and my weight has suffered from a 10% rise in inflation 
I remember buying Scholastic Books at school, for I believe ten or fifteen cents. The paperbacks I bought at the drugstore were more expensive, but I think that they were about thirty-five cents to half a dollar. I’m not sure on the exact amount. When I first started buying my own stamps, they were eight cents.
The reason that buffalo wings were made from wings in the first place is because wings used to be extremely cheap, and the guy’s mother had a bunch of wings sitting around that she intended to make soup out of, or so the legend goes. Chicken breasts used to be more in line with the general price of chicken parts, too. Then every dietitian in America said that if we INSISTED on eating animal flesh, we should eat skinless chicken breasts. People who will eat dark meat can get chicken leg quarters at bargain prices, although this might change in the future. I’ve found that ground turkey is affordable and tasty, as long as I don’t try to pretend that it’s a ground beef substitute.
When I first began smoking, you could buy a pack of Salems from the machine (back before the only place you found them was in bars) for .35 or at the corner grocery for .32. Now, I pay almost $6 for a pack of Virginia Slims in a state with lower cigarette taxes. That’s almost what two cartons cost in the early seventies.
Fifteen years ago, I was paying around $.89 for a sixteen oz jar of Skippy peanut butter. Now, I pay $2.59.
OTOH, twenty years ago, audio cassettes were around eight bucks. The 2 CD set I bought last week was only $13 and I make about three times the salary as then.
Be very, very glad you don’t live in Australia, where the average price of a paperback is around $25. And an Australian dollar is near enough to a US Dollar as to make no real difference for the purposes of this comparison.
Groceries in general just seem to keep getting more and more expensive here too… you’re looking at $5 for a loaf of bread and 2l of milk in most supermarkets nowadays.
Some more things just occurred to me. Candy bars and packs of gum were a nickel, as were ice cream cones (sugar cones cost an extra cent). Soft pretzels were four for a nickel; I asked my aunt who went to school in the 30s and she said they were a penny a piece then. I used to love something called TastyPies (the Tasty Baking company was mostly in and around Philadelphia). They cost 8c on the day the Korean war started. The next day, they were 9c and the day after that they were a dime. Obviously the company was worried that the wage and price controls that were in effect during WW II would be reinstated. In 1964, my new wife and I took a charter flight to Europe, round trip for $250 a piece. It was supposed to be a jet, but wasn’t; it was a stretched DC6 and the trip over took about 12 hours.
I remember movie tickets at about the $3 mark, and I remember $3000 cars being given away on The Price Is Right game show.
All the extra profanity in Australian editions requires more paper.
I spent my junior year of college in Israel. When I arrived, the exchange rate was three shekels to the dollar. Very shortly afterward, it fell abruptly, to four shekels to the dollar.
It took awhile for everything to get repriced and for a couple months there, those of us living on dollars were like big rollers. Everything was cheap.
I got to experience the other side a few years later, though, when I was living in Bulgaria and the dollar lost so much ground against the euro. (Bulgaria doesn’t use euros, but the lev is pegged to it at a rate of 1-2, so when the euro goes up, the lev goes up too.) It sucked. I got paid in leva, so it wasn’t too big a deal for awhile, but when Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007, prices on everything shot up, enough that the stingy people at Peace Corps actually gave us a raise. (When some volunteers complained it wasn’t enough, they shot back that the Bulgarians weren’t getting raises so we should be grateful we got anything.)
Well, there’s an example of low inflation: my local grocery store often runs $1 2-liter sales.
It’s actually been stable at about 3.7 to the dollar for the past year and a half, after the steep drop from 4.7 that occured when the U.S. markets collapsed.
But anyway - thank the Almighty you weren’t here in the early 1980’s; inflation reached 445% in 1984. I was just a kid at the time, but to this day I don’t like having cash on me; I always feel like it’ll be worthless next week.
When I was a kid in the early 70s you could buy a chocolate bar and a pop for 25 cents, get two cents back for the empty glass bottle and then get two more penny candies.
When I started driving gas was 22 cents a litre. Four of us would get together on Saturday nights and party for 5 each: 3 for beer, $1 for smokes, and $1 for gas. Yeah, touring the back-roads while drinking was a favourite pastime.
Reminds me of a pissed off client. They did a study to see what a good size for their product would be. It turned out that their size was a bit too large and that customers preferred one about 30% smaller.
Several months later the client called, all pissed off. Seems they took our advice and sales PLUMMETED! After much gnashing of teeth we discovered that they did offer the smaller package…at the same price of course. :rolleyes:
Back the Mad was 25 cents cheap.
Some more I thought of. When I was in college, tuition went up to $2250 a term (too damn much) sparking signs for the traditional MIT spontaneous tuition riot.
In the mid-70s when I lived in mid-state Illinois, ground beef was 68 cents a pound, but you could get T-bone steaks for $2 a pound - cheap enough that I could afford them on a grad student’s salary.
I’m sensitive to magazine price inflation since I am indexing my sf magazines. They were 25 cents for pretty much all of the 50s, rising to 35 cents at the end, then 50 cents in the mid-60s, and up to 60 cents by the end. As time went on, not only did the price go up but the time between price changes shrank. I should plot this some day. I bet you could predict the Dow based on magazine price and page count. Today they are think and expensive.
Compared to student fee increases, though, that’s nothing. I was a TA for one term, at quarter-time, earning $10/hour. I was able to pay my full-time student fees out of that easily and have a few hundred left over.
Motel, Overnight Stay
I recall sitting with my sister in the back seat of a parked car, waiting for our parents to come out of choir practice, and making up silly songs based on the signs we could see, one of which was for a cut-rate model.
$2 for a room with a single bed, $4 for a double.
Valdosta GA, circa 1966 or 67. Probably wasn’t a ritzy place (comparable to Dollar Inn or Hotel 6 or some such). Looks like you’d drop $30 to overnight nowadays.
12 oz Bottle of Soda
10¢ if you drank it on the spot and returned the bottle to the wooden bottle case, 13¢ bottle deposit included. In most places of the same ilk (delis, corner convenience stores, etc) you’d drop a dollar for it now.
Pack of Winstons
50¢ either over the counter or from cigarette vending machines when I was in High School circa 1975, Los Alamos NM. Something like $8-$9 per pack nowadays, I think?
For an inverse situation, I’m typing this on a (relatively old) 1.67 GHz machine with 2 GB of RAM and a 250 GB hard disk. I don’t think you can easily buy one that slow with specs that low but I paid $2300 for it in '06. In 1991, the first PowerBook (with 16 MHz processor, 2 MB RAM, and a 20 MB HD) ran for about the same amount. There’s no way to figure out how much a computer with specs like mine would have sold for 20 years ago, but in 1990 the IIfx (40 MHz, 40 MB HD, 4 MB RAM) would have run you $10,000.
This past December, I had the misfortune of having to spend a night at a Motel 6 in a little town in Northern California, near the Oregon border, because I-5 was shut down due to snow. It was $60. I’m pretty sure that’s the rate here in Portland, as well.
Sub shop lunches.
A couple of years ago, you could get a small sub for about $5.50 or so. Now it’s $6.50 at the same shop, and the meals tax also went up from 7% to 9%.
When I started driving (1985,) minimum wage was US 3.35 per hour, and gasoline was about .70 per gallon. I made $3.50 per hour at the time (paid in cash, no deductions,) so I could buy 5 gallons of fuel with one hour’s work.
Last night, gasoline was about $2.80 per gallon, and minimum wage is $7.25 per hour - that’s about 2.6 gallons of fuel per hour.
But, as others have mentioned, the price of technology has dropped drastically: I’m typing this response on my new laptop, which cost less than an AppleII back in the day, and does about a zillion times more. And I can buy a lot of medicines for far less than their relative cost 25 years ago - from ibuprofen to a lot of prescriptions (most places around here offer a month’s supply of generic maintenance medicines like my iron pills or my husband’s blood pressure meds for $4.00 per month/$10-$12 for three months.) Also, with the advent of so many new communication technologies, I can’t remember the last time I worried about the cost of long distance telephone tolls - my $20/month cable-based home phone and my cell phone don’t charge extra for domestic long distance.
Yeah, I hate that. If you’re gonna offer less merchandise or food or whatever, DROP THE PRICE on the new, smaller package! I do notice when I’m being charged the same amount of money for less product. And I get furious because I think it’s a particularly sneaky way of increasing revenue. Had the client dropped the price, even by 20% or so, their customers probably would have been happy, and the client’s sales would have soared.