Then and Now
By Harris Sherline
November 30, 2009
Listening to the news and the constant complaints about how high prices are these days started me thinking about the cost of things in earlier years -- and comparing the two.
To give the current crop of young people a sense of what life was like when I was growing up, consider some of the changes my generation has witnessed:
We were born before television, polio vaccine, frozen foods, Xerox, plastic contact lenses, and Frisbees. There were no pantyhose, dishwashers, clothes dryers, electric blankets, air conditioners, or drip-dry clothes. And, we were around before radar, credit cards, the A bomb, computers, cell phones, DVD's and DVR's, laser beams, ball point pens, penicillin and jet airplanes.
In the 60s, it took around 12 hours to fly from LA to Chicago in propeller-driven aircraft. Today it takes about four hours to make the same trip in a jet. And, the space shuttle and space station existed only in the imaginations of engineers and scientists.
I saw Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon -- on TV - in July 1969. It was one of the most riveting and exciting moments of my life.
Technology has progressed to the point today that events in space are treated more or less as commonplace. But back then, nothing like it had ever happened, and most people thought they would never live to see it. Landing on the moon was literally science fiction, and seeing a man walk on the moon 40 years ago was like a living science fiction fantasy.
My first car was a used 1936 Ford convertible, which I bought for $300. If the cost is translated into the hours of work it took to earn that amount of money, around 750 hours labor was required (at the 1946 minimum wage of 40 cents an hour). Earning the minimum wage of $8.00 an hour in California today, it still takes about the same number of work hours to buy an equivalent car for, say, $6,000.
Another comparison: gasoline. At 20 cents a gallon in the 40s, about 30 minutes work was needed to earn enough money to buy one gallon, while at the current price of approximately $3.00 a gallon (in Santa Barbara, CA), it takes a little over 22 minutes to earn the cost of one gallon of gas (at the $8.00 per hour minimum wage in California). So, in terms of the amount of labor needed to earn enough money to pay for a gallon of gasoline, the price today is actually about one-third less than it was in the 40s.
A 1963 Thanksgiving sale ad for a local market where we live (Santa Ynez Valley, CA) offers some interesting price comparisons for common grocery items, then and now:
Then (1963)
Turkey: 39 cents a pound.
Eggs: 44 cents a dozen.
Diet Pepsi: 49 cents for a six-pack, 8.2 cents each
T-bone steak: 98 cents a pound.
Yams: 30 cents a pound.
Coffee: 98 cents a pound, or 6 cents per ounce
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