What Decade Are You Living In, Ma'am?

[protege]

I hear ya... Has anyone priced hobby supplies lately?

I can remember buying model cars for less than $2.00 apiece. Now, some of those same kits are approaching $20, and the quality isn't nearly as good now. (If anyone wonders why, the molds used to make some of the kits are getting old, and the company usually doesn't clean or repair them until they literally wear out. As such, molded details aren't as crisp, and the finished product isn't as nice.) Throw in that a little jar of paint (.50 years ago) is now over $3.50, simply because the formulas changed--solvent (smelly, toxic), to water-based (safer)...but still. Some of the newer paint is literally crap--it's not much different than applying colored water!

It's not all gloom and doom though. Some of the prices on newer things are justified. Anyone who has seen the new HO scale model railroad cars from Walthers knows what I mean...the detailing on those is freaking awesome. They're a bit more expensive, but it's worth it. Flush-fitting windows, interior details, underbody details...whereas some lesser brands still make do with the bare minimum.

[greensinestro]

I can beat that. I think this was sometime in the mid-70s. My mom took me and my brother to the store and got us each a candy bar. As we were walking back, I remember her complaining that the candy bars were 15 cents each.

I remember those days, too. I'm thirty-five now and can remember that. I just wish I could remember what it cost to eat at a restaurant, or what it cost to buy a car. Thanks to Game Show Network's reruns of shows like "The Hollywood Squares" (Peter Marshall version), or "Let's Make A Deal", I've been able to see how "cheap" things were then, yet everyone said was expensive.

[freaktard]

You should see how much the Bound editions cost. It's almost $30 for five issues of Hellboy or Sandman.

$30.00 for Sandman? Why, that's outrageous! I can remember when they were only $14.95!

Ooh, crap...

[CrazedClerk]

I myself am a child of the 80s but I know I am getting older since even I am starting bitch about how expensive things are!

I do live in Canada, but I remember growing up:

Footlong sub: $5

New release video rental: $3.44

Candy Bar: 0.86 INCLUDING tax

Theatre admission: $8, $4 on Tuesdays

Gas at 0.55/Litre (1.70/gallon for you imperial folks, but we pay more for gas up here because it's taxed more heavily)

Round of bowling: $6

McDonald's cheesburger: $0.85

Magazine: $5

Man $20 used to be good for a whole night out.

[AFpheonix]

There's still a $2 theater in Forest Grove that I go to occasionally, but they show pretty old movies. Not classic movies, I mean that they probably have something like Hellboy vintage on now.

The OP's lady sounds a lot like a crazy Alzheimer's patient that we get occasionally, and you can tell when she hasn't been taking her meds. She doesn't cuss loud enough for the entire store to hear anymore, but she's still got quite the mouth on her, and she's pissed that we're not Fred Meyer's.
She's convinced that everything that we sell would be cheaper there. She repeatedly tells me how much she hates this store, yet she's in it all the time.
Sigh....wish her handlers would keep a better eye on her...

[Buglady]

I don't think I'll ever stop bitching about the death of the cheap Tuesday movie!

[Rapscallion]

I remember, when I was a kid, the gas station near my house sold candy for 2.5 cents. Yes, there was a half cent after the 2 cents.

I always wondered what they did if someone wanted an odd number of candy

It used to be the norm over here for sweets to be sold by weight. The lady I used to work with is in her eighties, but she says that when she was a girl she asked for a quarter of a pound of lemon sherberts. The retailer couldn't get it exact, so he took a toffee hammer and broke one in half!

Rapscallion

[Delphae]

A few years back, my cousin and I were discussing our first jobs and the pay. My dad pipes up with, "My first job I got paid 25 cents an hour."
My cousin replied "Doing what? Hunting mammoths?"

[blas]

Delphae, I love it!!!

I always joke with my dad that when he was a kid, they didn't have toys. They used rocks and sticks to play baseball and they had Flintstone-like automobiles. His nickname is "fossil".

[Andara Bledin]

*sigh*

I remember when I could get into the Saturday matinee for 50c. It wasn't a first run theater, but, still, it cost $1 for me and my brother, and then another $5 for popcorn and sodas. ('cause you know we couldn't possibly have shared a single large popcorn, oh, no... we had to each have our own personal small)

^-.-^

[protege]

They used rocks and sticks to play baseball and they had Flintstone-like automobiles.

Hehe one of our family cars *was* built for Fred Flintstone. We had a '79 Volvo sedan with a few rust holes in the floor. Throw in the holed rear fender, and that thing was nearly transparent

You've all heard the "I had to walk to school...uphill both ways" line? Well, where I live, depending on which way you go, technically it *is* uphill both ways

[Sofar]

I can imagine Civil War veterans in the nineteen-teens complaining that a tuppence doesn't buy you anything anymore.

Cheeseburger Deluxe, (one third of a pound, with lettuce tomatoes and onion,) no fries, no drink, at my restaurant: $4.50 plus 42 cents in sales tax.

Washington minimum wage as of January 1st, 2007: $7.95.

One thousand square foot four bedroom brick tudor, built 1930, situated on a lot less than half again larger than the house itself, with crumbling plaster, ill-conceived updates, mishapen door frames, and ugly white vinyl-framed windows, in Seattle: $1500 a month.

[Skandranon]

My college actually was uphill both ways. It was in a small, steep valley, with the excersize field in the bottom, dorms on one side, classes on the other. And yet I still gained 15 lbs my first year. Go figure.

[Jules Of All Trades]

There's a small first-run theatre near me that costs $1.50 and people were actually complaining recently that the price had gone up $.50 (can you imagine a first-run show for one dollar?). The only have 3 movies at a time but one of them is always a popular kids movie. Their popcorn and sodas are cheap too! It was like finding a long-lost treasure when we stumbled across it one day, and is the only reason why my kids get to see anything in the theatre.

For all five of us, hubby, myself and the boys we can see a movie and have refreshments for less than $20. Yay!!

[Ghostlightkeeper]

Sorry, going slightly OT

*Climbs up on soap box*

Not to get all technical, but the real question is how much more does it cost not in strait dollars but as a percentage of the average income.

If you look at the statistics the cost of things as a percentage of the average middle class income has been going up since the mid 70's and has really gone up dramatically in the past 5 to 10 years.

What this means is that the middle class is actually been getting poorer and shrinking for at least three decades but you almost never hear about that on the 6 o' clock news.

I for one find that just a little odd since it was the explosive growth of the middle class in the post WW2 period that made the USA "Great". (Or at least the political and economic power that it is.)

*Climbs down off of soap box*

Sorry, my social conscience has been bugging me and I'm feeling crabby at the world.

CORRECTION: The cost of some things like consumer electronics have gone down, but the cost of necessities, like food, gas, utilities, and mortgages have gone up.