Do you remember when you could buy a chocolate bar for 45 cents, or go to the movies for 4 dollars and all your snacks and still be under ten dollars? I remember penny candies at 7-eleven and when I started smoking it was 4 bucks a pack.
If you sit down and talk with your parents they will reminisce about how much things used to cost and it's way under anything we remember, and your grandparents will shock your parents with the prices of things from their era. My father used to say it cost him 2 bits to go to the movies. That's 25 cents to the younger generation.
You have to take into consideration the quality of movie they would go and see, probably black and white and hard as rock seats. Smoking was allowed everywhere including the theatre so I'm sure there was quite the haze in the little area.
It wasn't any cheaper than it is now if you really think about it because it's all relevant when it comes to the prices of things and how much money we made now and back then. When my parents were growing up they would make 5 cents an hour as kids and maybe 2 dollars an hour as an adult, and as the industry grew prices go up and wages increase to compensate.
A person could buy a new car for 1000 dollars but they made 4 dollars an hour at a good job, and you could buy a house for 10,000 with the same wage. There was no overtime, or vacation pay, you had to earn every single dollar you made. The vehicles didn't have air conditioning, heated seats, sun roofs or complicated stereo systems.
A person in our current era can buy a new car for around 20,000 dollars, but you don't have to pay the whole thing off at once and can make payments. They also make 15 to 20 dollars an hour, with paid time off. A person can also have side jobs such as internet websites or invest their money to make more of it.
Things aren't any cheaper now than they were in the past, the money they made then and the money we make now is all relevant, they got paid less and things cost less, things cost more now but we get paid more. Everything is relevant to the past as it is too now.
Scott Goerz
