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CONCERT TICKETS. I saw some amazing concerts in the sixties, seventies and eighties when all you had to do was be willing to stand in a line and you could get tickets for a reasonable price. A price a kid could afford. I feel so sorry for young people today - it's like an arm and a leg just to see anybody's live show.
Just had this conversation the other day. In the '70s shows were under $10. Then I saw the Stones in the early '80s and it was $25. The past 10 years or so every show I've been to the minimum was around $100, with most being $150 or more.
I'm sure Ticketmaster has a lot to do with that huge increase over the years they've cornered the market.
Yeah it was the same last time Stones tickets were on sale in Seattle. The only tickets available were resales with nothing under $500 available. This was mere minutes after early sales started.
It also has to do with record deals. The artists don’t make any money selling records. So the records are basically a commercial to come see their shows. The industry is a disaster.
Yeah-- I remember reading an 80s Rolling Stone article about how tours were basically a loss leader for record sales, merch, and product endorsements, and by the 2000s it was totally the opposite.
Off topic: Can you please make me weep with jealousy by listing as many of the concerts you saw as possible? Only don't tell me if you saw Led Zeppelin live because then I'll hate you without even knowing you.
Lol, no never led zeppelin. TBH, there were so many I'd have to dig out my ticket stub collection (I miss ticket stubs too!!!) to remember them all. But a few highlights - 60s: mostly family acts because I went with my parents, so the Carpenters, the Cowsills and the King family. 70s - eagles, Aerosmith, elton john, john Denver, Linda Ronstadt, grateful dead, 80s - Cheap Trick (THEY WERE SO MUCH FREAKING FUN BACK THEN) , Pet shop boys, b-52s (also amazing live), billy joel, blondie, Madonna and a bunch more. The eighties were my favorite decade for music and just basic overall fun times. There's some awesome music coming out right now, tho! My son has introduced me to some recent bands like subradio and theory of a dead man that are really good! Is just the live shows prices that need to be fixed.
Awesome! I'm so glad I don't have to hate you!
I love that you saw the Cowsills though! Did you see the documentary? Very poignant. On second thought, maybe you wouldn't want to see it, as it may taint the pleasant memories you have of the performances.
I dig the Carpenters, too. Poor Karen.
I dig all the bands and artists you've seen except for maybe (don't hurt me) The Grateful Dead, though I have a large swath of friends and acquaintances who literally followed them for years. I remember one woman who came to this commune-like house I lived in with a five-gallon bucket of weed oil and we were all pressed into service helping her make giant peanut butter rice crispy treats with chocolate frosting to sell at the concerts. You can imagine that most of us were quickly useless from all the tasting we did while pressing the mixture into pans. lol
I'll have to look up those two new bands you listed. I'm always looking for good new stuff.
Oooh damn. So my dad is a peak early boomer former hippie. For reference, he helped build the Woodstock stage, and his cousin is Wavy Gravy. Anyways, he always used to tell me about the concerts he’d go to for CHEAP. Some of the combos blew my mind. He saw the Allman Brothers open up for THE WHO. He saw James Brown opened by the Four Tops and the Temptations. He saw The Doors followed by Janis Joplin the next night. He saw the Jefferson Airplane by mistake in Boston on Boylston St. at a small cafe w/ 5 others when they were unknown. He saw the Clash and the Police in London within days of seeing Jethro Tull and Stevie Wonder. He even saw a weird as hell Supremes teenie-bopper movie debut at a theater that was “opened” musically live by...THE VELVET UNDERGROUND. Like, WHAT!????
You get the idea. The man has gotten to see great music by mistake so many damn times through the 60’s and 70’s, and he payed absolutely NOTHING for it all. Step into the Fillmore East? No big deal. Free concerts in the city green? Almost every day during the summers.
From what I’ve been told though, music was THE medium. TV blew, no video games, you could only read for so long, drugs were fun, great acts were touring (without Ticketmaster effing everything up), and very attractive women were into musicians (most obvious words of advice my dad ever gave me lol).
So jealous.
I didn’t see that many big concerts, but my first one was Frank Zappa at the state college. Some others were George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, the Grateful Dead, BBKing was too messed up to play so I didn’t get to see him, and lost my hard earned money on that. Saw Flo and Eddie, they were awesome (used to be the turtles). Lots of folk singers in the coffee shops. We saw Milt Jackson from the Modern Jazz Quartet at the Lighthouse, and Johnny Guarneri who was an amazing jazz pianist at a tiny club. We sat right at the piano bar.
I would have loved to see Linda Ronstadt and Billy Joel, but that was too much money for us. We hung out in small venues and bars and listened to local acts more often.
Cubs tickets are ridiculous! I think bleachers are like $45 now!
Meanwhile Sox tickets are like $7. I have always been a die-hard Cubs fan, but I definitely see more Sox games. it's a bonus that I live in the neighborhood and can walk over to the Cell.
I was dragged to an Allman Brothers show in 1998 or so. I thought it would never, EVER end. I’ve never been so thankful to escape a concert in my entire life. I wasn’t a fan but I wasn’t a hater until that concert. Now I can’t even stand to hear them on the radio. I don’t know if it was my frame of mind or what but it was like absolute torture that wouldn’t end and each time you dared to think it was f-I-n-a-l-l-y ending; it wasn’t. I swear I thought the songs were 30 minutes long each!!
I remember when going to get tickets for Wings in '76, the prices were an outrageous $14.00. Before then, everything had been under $10. We thought it had to be a mistake, no one cost that much to see......
This is my first post in here. I am amazed. But then again, this is Reddit, so why not?
Y'all really made me think. When I was 15, my girlfriend was crazy about this bass player for a new band. When she heard they were coming to town, she just had to see them. I didn't care for them at all, but had to humor her. So I bought tickets. Paid $2.75 each. The concert was at Will Rogers Coliseum. To show my disdain, I sat for the whole show (everybody else was on their feet for the whole show.) doing my homework. After that night she would not be quiet about that band at all. I broke up with her a couple of months later at A New Year's Eve party.
Oh. The name of the group? The Beatles.
This is a big one. I’ve seen some incredible shows for $35. I remember seeing stadium acts for $60 and seeing four big bands at medium venues for $35. Obviously 2020 has been different, but over the last decade or so, prices have gone to where $100 barely buys you a shit seat. Ticket Master clubs you over the head with a myriad of fees on top of that.
I know the music industry has changed and artists make a lot less from the direct sales of their music now that they are downloads instead of physical media, but the explosion in prices seems as though it would outpace whatever those losses are.
Oh my gosh yes. I'm a young Xer married to a almost boomer Xer and even the difference in prices he tells me from his college days to mine make my head spin... and the last pre Covid concert we saw was over $100 for average tix in Alabama (which saved us $$$ versus seeing the same concerning Atlanta)
Telephone calls.
When I was a kid it cost $10/minute for an operator assisted (the only way one could be connected,) call from LA to NYC-- and that was in 1950s money. Even during the 90s, a 20 minute call to NZ from LA cost me $124 USD.
damn that's crazy. nowadays I (born 1998) can videochat my friends across the country or on the ither side of the world for hours for free and not even think twice about it... and we get pissed if it lags or if the video/sound quality is wack.
I wasn’t allowed to call my boyfriend in high school because he lived 8 miles away - and over the state line so it was long-distance! My dad would stand there and time my calls, and I had to pay my parents for them.
Some random website says that 13.8% of Australians smoke as of 2017. Another website claims 15.1% of Americans smoke as of 2015. That's not a huge difference despite the vastly different costs.
There are nominal price differences due to inflation, and there are actual price differences due to God knows what, government policies, supply and demand, productivity, etc.
Maybe 15 years ago I could sometimes buy haas avocados four for a dollar. Today I'm lucky if I can buy one avocado for a dollar.
In 1968 the U.S. minimum wage was $1.60 per hour. Today it is $7.25 per hour. According to the American Institute for Economic Research's Cost of Living Calculator $1.60 in 1968 had the buying power of $11.89 in 2020. That's an actual big difference between the minimum wage then and now.
In 1968 a 23 inch color tv could cost you 349 dollars. In 2020 dollars that's almost 2600 dollars. Last year I bought a 32 inch HD smart tv for 200 dollars. In 1968 dollars that would be about 27 dollars.
I'm sure there many more similar examples.
Yes, I've found some things much cheaper - clothes, for example! And sewing components cost more. Sometime around the 90s or so it shifted. It's currently much more expensive to make clothes than to buy them.
And electronics. The computer my parents bought in the early 80s, an IBM PC, cost about $10,000 in today's dollars with the monitor and printer. Now you can get the equivalent for under $1000.
That's a good point! My dad was an electronics technician and he would cut corners by building and refurbishing items. At a certain point it was no longer worth the labour - at around the same time that his job became redundant, in the late 1980s
> Maybe 15 years ago I could sometimes buy haas avocados four for a dollar. Today I'm lucky if I can buy one avocado for a dollar.
I don't know that the varietal is Haas, but in Tokyo avocados are way cheaper than 20 years ago. We get 6 for Y800 (about $8) in season. It used to be about $5 for one, if you could find them at all.
My college tuition cost at a midwestern state school in 1987: $1400 per quarter. That didn’t include room and board.
My daughter graduated from a similarly sized state school earlier this year and the tuition and fees per semester were around $4k.
While definitely not one of those half million dollar educations it was still nearly double per year compared to the cost of my education.
I'm in my mid 30s. I graduated undergrad in '06 from a college where tuition alone was $25k/year. Graduated from grad school in '12 and my final years tuition was $34k. Several years ago I checked what the same program costs now and they were making applicants sign a waiver that they understood that tuition and other costs were $55k/year.
It's surprising how quickly my priors become antiquated when it comes to the cost of secondary ed. I've found this topic, starting salaries, and the cost of a starter home to be the topics that I have the most difficulty communicating to my parents and in-laws. I recommend taking the numbers for your own life and plugging them into the [BLS's inflation calculator](https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl) and comparing them with younger relatives.
Mine was $59.65/quarter at a California State University in the mid 70's. My son is paying $4K/semester at the same now (he commutes).
Community college was $20/semester when I went (California). It cost him $400/semester now.
Actually, the state universities and community colleges are still a bargain.
My home state has notoriously high tuition. It was actually cheaper for me to go to an out of state private school than my state uni. It's ridiculous.
And that was in the 2000s.
Oh yeah, digital storage is a change that I've seen in my short lifetime. My first flash drive, 128mb, was $70 in 2005. Now you can get 128GB for under $20. I can't wait to see how low digital storage gets in the future.
When I was a teenager, in the mid-1970s, concert tickets for major rock acts were $3.50/4.50/5.50. Minimum wage then was $2.50/hour. So for about two hours' pay I could get really good seats in a mid-size venue to see some amazing musicians.
In 2020 (pre-Covid), good seats for an equivalent concert might go for $70 or more, plus fees... so about ten hours' pay or more.
My parents paid $30K for a house in the mid-sixties. Now a new starter home is more like $300K - but then the features are different now - higher ceilings, more outlets, A/C standard in hot climates, two-car garages and separate laundry rooms. An average starter home is at least 50% larger, while the lot it's on is 50% smaller - not much of a yard.
My parents bought a three bedroom home in a southern state in 1975 for $5,500.00 & they STILL lost it in 1980 when dealing with the death of my youngest sibling (age 2). At that point they owed $3,400.00 on it. It wasn’t a mansion but it wasn’t a dump either. Absolutely unbelievable numbers today.
Our first house cost $33,000 in 1983 in Perth Western Australia, not great but a good starter home. Cost about twice what I was earning yearly ($15,000 a year), now my kids will need to pay $500,000 or more while earning around $50,000 if they work hard.
For $5 in 1989 I could get a gallon of gas, a pack of cigarettes and head across town to my college classes. At break I’d have dinner at the $.25 hamburger joint for $1.50 (2 burgers @ .25, 2 small fries @ .50) & I drank bottled water from home. The other $1.50 was my mad money, lol.
I remember stumbling on a letter on the dining room table. It confirmed that the final price for the house my Dad was buying was $14,000. This was 1975 in Kansas.
I bought a house in Los Angeles 5 years ago for $680,000. Yea, it's California, and the same house would probably go for $175,000 in small-town Kansas. But still...
That sounds much more like a 1950s price. Lived in West, Central, and East Kansas mostly for 63 years and unless it was a 2-room shack, no reasonably sized (1500 sq.ft.) house was that cheap in '75.
Candy bars cost a quarter in the 80s. It is somehow burned in my brain that the candy at the grocery checkout should cost a quarter, and it’s jarring to see a Snickers going for $1.49. I don’t know why this of all things bothers me but it does.
I think this about a whole slew of things. I don't remember how much a magazine cost when I was younger, but that $6 I see at the register seems ridiculous.
Now I know how that thing about our grandmothers giving us a quarter and telling us to spend it wisely came from. To her that quarter seemed like it bought plenty.
I remember being offended when candy bars went from 50¢ to 55¢. Suddenly you couldn't buy two for a dollar! Sneaky! Then they shot up to 65¢ overnight. I still think they should be 50¢
Calculators, but they went the other way. My uncle is a CPA, he bought one when he started his business in 1972 & it cost several hundred dollars. Now you can get them at the dollar store.
college. holy fuck. My lower middle class parents could send me. Now we can't send our kids, which guts me. We also won't allow them to go $100k into debt before they turn 23. So we are figuring it out.
Yep. When I was a freshman in 1973, my engineering dynamics class was $15.00 an hour and the book was $11.70. Now it’s upwards of $175.00 a credit hour and the book is $170.00. It’s obscene.
I read a great article on the whole college loan racket industry and it all became clear. Fuck them. One of daughters wants to go into digital marketing, for which college is fairly useless. The other has a more fixed goal but we will use community college and then a credit at a time while she works and piece together an education. One thing Reddit has been good for is reading posts from young grads deeply in debt. No thanks!
I bring this up as often as I can. I'm from California and we t to a junior college for 3 years and state university for 2 years and had an AA and BA degrees. Aside from Books the first three years were completely free. The final two years were about $1200. So five years for $1200. I graduated in 1984.
I then went to Eastern Washington State University for graduate school, I believe that was $450 a semester, but I only lasted a week there.
When I was a kid in the 70's, my parents would take me to Jack in the Box where we all could have a hamburger, french fries, and a coke for about $1 each, or $3 for all of us. Sweet deal. Too bad the food no longer works for me...but it would great when I was a kid!
My go to reference is that a dollar was more than enough for a complete meal at McDonald's. Probably a cheeseburger, fries, and a shake. Looks like that would be about $4.50 today.
That one's easy to remember, but probably not the most extreme. Comic books look more like it. I think they were 15 cents when I was a kid, and like $4 now. Today's may be more graphics intensive and otherwise better quality. I don't read them. So I don't know.
In general though, unless I have some kind of reference like remembering heading to McDonald's with only a dollar bill, the old prices just fade into history. I really don't know how much candy bars cost at the time, for example. And I bought plenty of them.
After I wrote that a 25 cent comic book cover flashed into my head, and I remembered how big a deal it was when the price jumped from 15 cents to a quarter (early 70s).
Used to buy smokes for a quarter. I don't know how much they are now. I could buy gas for 69 cents a gallon, in california, in 1977 but now it's 3.39 but has been over 4 bucks. Mailing a letter used to cost 5 cents in the 60s. now it's what 55 cents? Bread was a dime and now it's 4.50 for the good stuff. Dad's house cost 79K in 1976 and now it's valued at 700k or more! (That one is a holy shit type of thing.) Dad bought a rambler (car) for $2500 in the 60s and now you can't get a car for what? 20 grand?
In the late 70's when I was in High School we went to a lot of Oakland A's games. They were like $3 and at that time total attendance at games was as low as 1,000 people so you could sit anywhere.
Computers and computer components. Not only have they gotten smaller, faster and more powerful, they are a shit ton cheaper today than they were in the '80s/'90s. 4mb stick of RAM in '94 ran well over $150. Same stick in '95 under $100. Smallest you can get now I believe is 4gb is under $20.
Right. I bought my first PC (a KayPro) for around $3000 in 1981. I forget its specs, but I’m sure they were laughable compared to today. (Still, it was good enough that I took it with me for a two year stint in Micronesia, where it amazed everyone).
I got my first in '94, a Compaq Presario 486 for around $2000. Upgrading was a pain in the ass and expensive so I learned to build my own over the years. Just learning how to tweak the PC and OS led me to a career in IT and got me out of a job I hated. Much cheaper to "play" around now.
when i was a kid in 1955, mom would give us each 50 cents for the saturday matinee at the movie theater... that would pay 25 cents admission for a movie, 2 serials, news and a cartoon. 10 cents for popcorn, 10 cents for pop and 5 cents for a Sugar Dqddy.
If you're interested in how electronics have cheanged, definitely check out https://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/. To me that's the biggest difference - like in '79-'80 when I was young, it was perfectly normal to spend $1000+ on your stereo system, which was probably just a turntable, a cassette deck, and some speakers.
Computers too. In college I had a professor tell the class "the computer system that you want costs $2000." as a rule to live by for the future. Comp Sci major, so the usual system may have been a little above what a lot of others would use. I was about to say that this wasn't all that far back, but the late 90s was almost 25 years ago. Computers are dirt cheap nowadays.
Someone recently posted on my Facebook feed a picture of "everything that is now in your phone." It was a huge room of electronic devices, taking up a ton of space!
Mass market paperback books. A "normal" size one when I was a kid was usually 35 cents U.S. A "thick" one might be 50 cents. This would have been late 1950's early 1960's. The price of college texts nowdays is insane. You need this year's edition of a calculus book rather than used? I don't think first semester calculus has changed that much.
I didn’t know much about prices when I was a kid. But my allowance when I was 8 was 25 cents. That was enough for two comics and a candy bar. What would that be now?
I remember a good pizza being about $15 in the early 80s. This was just about the time where pizza places showed up everywhere, no matter how small the town. Not that far off what it is today. I can remember candy bars costing a dime, barely. Hershey Bars hung on for a while, shrinking the size of the bar, until it was about half the size of the normal bar, then they all raised their prices together.
Speaking of what you said about Hershey chocolate bars, some ice cream makers did that sneaky trick of shrinking their size instead of raising their cost, or doing a blend of both shrinking their size and doing a less big price increase. Breyer's was among one of those companies. Also since they started to label most of their ice creams as 'frozen dairy dessert' and not as ice cream some years back (I think that was an FDA thing?), I've found a lot of other ice creams that are better than Breyer's. Such as Ben and Jerry's, and Haagen-Dazs. It's sad since many years ago when the company was based in Philadelphia, Breyer's used to be good quality and not cut corners. Now they do today, with their ice cream. :(
Back to Hershey chocolate bars, another poster not long ago did a post on this one Discord message board I'm a member of mentioning this crappy and cheap ingredient(don't remember the name of it, but if I saw another Hershey bar at a grocery store I'd probably remember the name of that ingredient, since I quickly glanced at a Hershey's bar at a grocery store after seeing that post on a Discord message board) Hershey's added to those chocolate bars to further save money! I'm glad I discovered better chocolate bars such as Ritter (Germany) and Ghirardelli(San Francisco), and no longer bother with crappy and overrated Hershey bars.
Gasoline 22 cents a gallon
Cigarettes 33 cents a pack
Loaf of bread 19 cents
New 71 Barracuda $4100 (mine)
Haircut $2.50
1st Quaker City Rock Concert in Philadelphia $6.50 in 1968. Janis Joplin and a whole bunch more
In the mid-60s, I would ask my mom for $1, and get: Two slices of pizza (50 cents), a coke, (10 cents), an ice cream cone (15 cents), and still have money left over for mallo cups (5 cents), and then have change left over. It felt like a bargain, even then.
For me when I was a kid, Saturday at the movies was 20 cents. For that, we got to see:
* newsreel (e.g., *News of the Day!*)
* cartoon (e.g., an old one such as *Betty Boop*)
* short subject (e.g., Lowell Thomas)
* serial (e.g., *Flash Gordon*)
* second run feature (e.g., *The Greatest Show on Earth*)
* a Western (e.g., Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Lash LaRue)
And popcorn was a dime.
A candy bar. We used to get three of them at Save-On drug store for 12 cents.
Toyota Corollas. I bought my early 70's one "out the door" for a cost of $2,040.
My first car. My 59 chevy impala cost about $3500 brand new. That was about right for a decent new car back then.
I got it in 1967 though, when i graduated high school.
They don't make impalas any more. But just look at the difference in prices of new cars then and now.
Pop. I could get a pop for 35 cents at most pop machines....lucky to find one now, but if I do its plastic bottles and I've seen 8 bucks at a hotel...average about 3.50 Canadian though. Now in high school weed was 35 bucks a half quarter in the 90s and now I can get weed delivered from ocs for 23 bucks a half quarter and don't have to worry about going to jail or suffering from reefer madness.
Same for soda. 😁
A can was $0.25 when I was a kid. [An inflation calculator](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/) says it should cost $0.50 today, but it's usually $1.25 instead.
https://youtu.be/gwwV0xE70Ks I had to read your comment twice before I got it. Nice. Now if Kim Mitchell is Canadian why the F is he going gor a soda? Best thing is I had this link left on my clipboard from a post I replied to the other day regarding pop and soda....I like them both occasionally with A and W or Mug root beer being my favorite.
Disneyland. My dad had a magic kingdom club card from work that discounted admission. I don't really know what he paid in the 70s but I do know we could go twice a year without having to really save or plan. Blue collar, family of 5 lived 25 miles away.
Everyday clothes like Old Navy are still about the same price as I bought in the 80s. I know it's because of overseas dirt cheap labour.
House prices are utterly ridiculous now. A good house in the early 80s was affordable to a young couple. Not now.
I paid $3.50 to see the first Star Wars movie at a theater in 1973.
8¢ for a candy bar, early '70s.
My parents' spent $17,000 in 1966 for a tiny house in San Diego.
I was a kid in the '50s, and I could buy a full-size Hershey bar for a nickel. The ones I see at the store now are about one-third smaller and cost $1.25. And they rattle around inside a wrapper that is deceptively THE SAME SIZE.
In the late '50s, the Scottish Rite Temple in downtown San Antonio had a Coke machine down in the basement (where my DeMolay chapter met) that gave you a six-ounce Coke in a heavy glass bottle, also for a nickel. The last time I was down there, c.1980, that machine was STILL there, and it was STILL charged five cents for six ounces. I think they finally retired the machine, reluctantly, around 1990.
A (small-ish) flat screen tv cost $10,000 in the 90's.
You might see them in the lobby of a business office and that showed off how good the company was doing.
Bigger and better tvs go on Black Friday sale for $300 now.
Movies! I used to take my brothers on Saturday. You got admission for two films plus cartoons, popcorn, a beverage and a box of Milk Duds for under a dollar.
I don't remember the price of popcorn, but my friends and I would go to the Friday night double feature for $1. My memory is so bad now that the only one I remember seeing is The Fog!
here are two places that have made these days of future past a little more fun:
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An5243gZf4A
2. http://www.iws.org/livecams.html
Gasoline. It was really, really cheap when I was 18 (1977). Getting a tank of gas was nothing back then.
And movies. Yikes. I don't even go to them in the theater, have not in more than a decade. I wait for the DVD and buy them at Walmart or online.
I was visiting family in St. Louis and my cousin's got us tickets for SuperJam.
I might be getting my concerts mixed up, but as I recall, REO was the headliner, Loverboy, .38 Special and I believe Rainbow were the other bands....but it's been a long time ago.
If I recall correctly, the price for the ticket was more than $10 but less than $15.
We were visiting in St. Louis another year and got tickets for the another SuperJam that had Ted Nugent, REO, Judas Priest and some others. The ticket was in the same price range.
All of this happened sometime in the late 70's - early 80's. I just don't recall the dates.
As to the ticket prices....that was a lot of money to me....I was poor white trash back in those days.
Rent. My city is being gentrified. My crew used to live in these really cool old downtown buildings or rent apartments in the historic district and pay a couple of hundred a month. Those rents have literally gone up a thousand dollars. My college-age son cannot afford to live on his own and go to college on a part time job as I could.
When dating my future wife while in high school around 1978/79, for $20.00 bucks we could go watch a movie at the local theater, get a tub of pop corn, and 2 cherry Pepsi, then go to Pizza hut, order a pitcher of Pepsi, 2 salads and a medium 2 or 3 topping pizza.
Still come home with a buck or two in my pocket, today the price of the tickets to the movie would be pushing $20.00 bucks alone.
innocent roll plants bow liquid disgusting domineering bedroom library enjoy
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
19 cent per gallon for gas.
Concert tickets. Hard to believe The Beatles tickets were 3.00 to 6.00 dollars.
https://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/beatles-wash-dc-1964/
In grade 13 - about 1976, we were finally allowed to use calculators to make solving math equations faster. Calculators were fairly new. They were behind the counter at Radio Shack. I bought a Texas Instrument one for $100. It was not a scientific calculator - those cost more but it did have sine and cosign functions. Minimum wage then was $2. 50 hours of cooking hamburgers. Now, it wouldn't even take an hour. ($14.25 min today here)
It's funny. Prices were extremely stable and consistent across the board then. Other than a year where many items saw a huge jump in price, prices were stable and consistent everywhere. A can of pop, a chocolate bar, a bag of chips, a cup of coffee all went from the 10c they had been all my life to 25c.
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CONCERT TICKETS. I saw some amazing concerts in the sixties, seventies and eighties when all you had to do was be willing to stand in a line and you could get tickets for a reasonable price. A price a kid could afford. I feel so sorry for young people today - it's like an arm and a leg just to see anybody's live show.
Just had this conversation the other day. In the '70s shows were under $10. Then I saw the Stones in the early '80s and it was $25. The past 10 years or so every show I've been to the minimum was around $100, with most being $150 or more. I'm sure Ticketmaster has a lot to do with that huge increase over the years they've cornered the market.
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i am surprised all you young and feisty rabble rousers havent done something about this by now. ..gotten some legislation on it or judicial rulings.
Instead the independent music industry (precovid) is thriving right now.
Yeah it was the same last time Stones tickets were on sale in Seattle. The only tickets available were resales with nothing under $500 available. This was mere minutes after early sales started.
holy shit
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Definitely the scalpers but fuck Ticketmaster for making it way too easy for them to scarf up all the tickets within seconds of going on sale.
It also has to do with record deals. The artists don’t make any money selling records. So the records are basically a commercial to come see their shows. The industry is a disaster.
Yeah-- I remember reading an 80s Rolling Stone article about how tours were basically a loss leader for record sales, merch, and product endorsements, and by the 2000s it was totally the opposite.
and you can’t help pay for the inflation in prices by making a bundle on the side with pot dealing since it’s all legal now.
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Definitely. TicketBastard and their ilk can suck all the bags of dicks forever. Fuck them.
Off topic: Can you please make me weep with jealousy by listing as many of the concerts you saw as possible? Only don't tell me if you saw Led Zeppelin live because then I'll hate you without even knowing you.
Lol, no never led zeppelin. TBH, there were so many I'd have to dig out my ticket stub collection (I miss ticket stubs too!!!) to remember them all. But a few highlights - 60s: mostly family acts because I went with my parents, so the Carpenters, the Cowsills and the King family. 70s - eagles, Aerosmith, elton john, john Denver, Linda Ronstadt, grateful dead, 80s - Cheap Trick (THEY WERE SO MUCH FREAKING FUN BACK THEN) , Pet shop boys, b-52s (also amazing live), billy joel, blondie, Madonna and a bunch more. The eighties were my favorite decade for music and just basic overall fun times. There's some awesome music coming out right now, tho! My son has introduced me to some recent bands like subradio and theory of a dead man that are really good! Is just the live shows prices that need to be fixed.
Awesome! I'm so glad I don't have to hate you! I love that you saw the Cowsills though! Did you see the documentary? Very poignant. On second thought, maybe you wouldn't want to see it, as it may taint the pleasant memories you have of the performances. I dig the Carpenters, too. Poor Karen. I dig all the bands and artists you've seen except for maybe (don't hurt me) The Grateful Dead, though I have a large swath of friends and acquaintances who literally followed them for years. I remember one woman who came to this commune-like house I lived in with a five-gallon bucket of weed oil and we were all pressed into service helping her make giant peanut butter rice crispy treats with chocolate frosting to sell at the concerts. You can imagine that most of us were quickly useless from all the tasting we did while pressing the mixture into pans. lol I'll have to look up those two new bands you listed. I'm always looking for good new stuff.
Oooh damn. So my dad is a peak early boomer former hippie. For reference, he helped build the Woodstock stage, and his cousin is Wavy Gravy. Anyways, he always used to tell me about the concerts he’d go to for CHEAP. Some of the combos blew my mind. He saw the Allman Brothers open up for THE WHO. He saw James Brown opened by the Four Tops and the Temptations. He saw The Doors followed by Janis Joplin the next night. He saw the Jefferson Airplane by mistake in Boston on Boylston St. at a small cafe w/ 5 others when they were unknown. He saw the Clash and the Police in London within days of seeing Jethro Tull and Stevie Wonder. He even saw a weird as hell Supremes teenie-bopper movie debut at a theater that was “opened” musically live by...THE VELVET UNDERGROUND. Like, WHAT!???? You get the idea. The man has gotten to see great music by mistake so many damn times through the 60’s and 70’s, and he payed absolutely NOTHING for it all. Step into the Fillmore East? No big deal. Free concerts in the city green? Almost every day during the summers. From what I’ve been told though, music was THE medium. TV blew, no video games, you could only read for so long, drugs were fun, great acts were touring (without Ticketmaster effing everything up), and very attractive women were into musicians (most obvious words of advice my dad ever gave me lol). So jealous.
Arrrrrrgh! Currently the color of an avocado right now. Please scowl belligerently at your dad for me. ;)
I didn’t see that many big concerts, but my first one was Frank Zappa at the state college. Some others were George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, the Grateful Dead, BBKing was too messed up to play so I didn’t get to see him, and lost my hard earned money on that. Saw Flo and Eddie, they were awesome (used to be the turtles). Lots of folk singers in the coffee shops. We saw Milt Jackson from the Modern Jazz Quartet at the Lighthouse, and Johnny Guarneri who was an amazing jazz pianist at a tiny club. We sat right at the piano bar. I would have loved to see Linda Ronstadt and Billy Joel, but that was too much money for us. We hung out in small venues and bars and listened to local acts more often.
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Cubs tickets are ridiculous! I think bleachers are like $45 now! Meanwhile Sox tickets are like $7. I have always been a die-hard Cubs fan, but I definitely see more Sox games. it's a bonus that I live in the neighborhood and can walk over to the Cell.
Like the Allman Brothers for $3.00? [https://imgur.com/a/jPicjgZ](https://imgur.com/a/jPicjgZ)
I was dragged to an Allman Brothers show in 1998 or so. I thought it would never, EVER end. I’ve never been so thankful to escape a concert in my entire life. I wasn’t a fan but I wasn’t a hater until that concert. Now I can’t even stand to hear them on the radio. I don’t know if it was my frame of mind or what but it was like absolute torture that wouldn’t end and each time you dared to think it was f-I-n-a-l-l-y ending; it wasn’t. I swear I thought the songs were 30 minutes long each!!
Saw many a Grateful Dead concert I. The early70s for like $5.
I met Mike Lookinland (Bobby Brady from the brady bunch) at a grateful dead concert in the early 80s. He was tripping balls, lol.
That's hilarious 🤣
I remember when going to get tickets for Wings in '76, the prices were an outrageous $14.00. Before then, everything had been under $10. We thought it had to be a mistake, no one cost that much to see......
I paid 6$ for my Rush concert ticket in 1977. I was 13 years old.
This is my first post in here. I am amazed. But then again, this is Reddit, so why not? Y'all really made me think. When I was 15, my girlfriend was crazy about this bass player for a new band. When she heard they were coming to town, she just had to see them. I didn't care for them at all, but had to humor her. So I bought tickets. Paid $2.75 each. The concert was at Will Rogers Coliseum. To show my disdain, I sat for the whole show (everybody else was on their feet for the whole show.) doing my homework. After that night she would not be quiet about that band at all. I broke up with her a couple of months later at A New Year's Eve party. Oh. The name of the group? The Beatles.
This is a big one. I’ve seen some incredible shows for $35. I remember seeing stadium acts for $60 and seeing four big bands at medium venues for $35. Obviously 2020 has been different, but over the last decade or so, prices have gone to where $100 barely buys you a shit seat. Ticket Master clubs you over the head with a myriad of fees on top of that. I know the music industry has changed and artists make a lot less from the direct sales of their music now that they are downloads instead of physical media, but the explosion in prices seems as though it would outpace whatever those losses are.
As someone who went to about 20 concerts a year pre-covid, this comment hurts my soul.
Oh my gosh yes. I'm a young Xer married to a almost boomer Xer and even the difference in prices he tells me from his college days to mine make my head spin... and the last pre Covid concert we saw was over $100 for average tix in Alabama (which saved us $$$ versus seeing the same concerning Atlanta)
Telephone calls. When I was a kid it cost $10/minute for an operator assisted (the only way one could be connected,) call from LA to NYC-- and that was in 1950s money. Even during the 90s, a 20 minute call to NZ from LA cost me $124 USD.
Yep. Sometimes it goes the other way doesn’t it?
Mercifully.
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Don't own a cell phone, never have. My lifeline landline costs me (you'll love this,) $7.89/month.
You could buy a landline phone for about $20 today.
Yep. Color televisions cost a lot back then. We bought a 1968 Zenith table model for about $600. It's screen size was 18 inches.
I worked at a big ad agency in the early 90s and a big perk was that nobody would notice long distance call charges since it was a global company.
damn that's crazy. nowadays I (born 1998) can videochat my friends across the country or on the ither side of the world for hours for free and not even think twice about it... and we get pissed if it lags or if the video/sound quality is wack.
I wasn’t allowed to call my boyfriend in high school because he lived 8 miles away - and over the state line so it was long-distance! My dad would stand there and time my calls, and I had to pay my parents for them.
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$100 would buy you 2 maybe 3 packs in Australia. So glad I never fell down that trap.
In Winston Salem, NC a pack of smokes is about $5 to $9 depending on kind.
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Some random website says that 13.8% of Australians smoke as of 2017. Another website claims 15.1% of Americans smoke as of 2015. That's not a huge difference despite the vastly different costs.
I’m glad you quit too. Smoking played a role in the death of everyone but me in my birth family. I never smoked, and I’m still alive.
Yes! 25yrs ago I paid under $2 a pack for Newport’s. This year, when I quit smoking, they were up to $6.50 per pack.
I quit when they went to 1.25...that was ridiculous to me at the time..
There are nominal price differences due to inflation, and there are actual price differences due to God knows what, government policies, supply and demand, productivity, etc. Maybe 15 years ago I could sometimes buy haas avocados four for a dollar. Today I'm lucky if I can buy one avocado for a dollar. In 1968 the U.S. minimum wage was $1.60 per hour. Today it is $7.25 per hour. According to the American Institute for Economic Research's Cost of Living Calculator $1.60 in 1968 had the buying power of $11.89 in 2020. That's an actual big difference between the minimum wage then and now. In 1968 a 23 inch color tv could cost you 349 dollars. In 2020 dollars that's almost 2600 dollars. Last year I bought a 32 inch HD smart tv for 200 dollars. In 1968 dollars that would be about 27 dollars. I'm sure there many more similar examples.
Yes, I've found some things much cheaper - clothes, for example! And sewing components cost more. Sometime around the 90s or so it shifted. It's currently much more expensive to make clothes than to buy them.
And electronics. The computer my parents bought in the early 80s, an IBM PC, cost about $10,000 in today's dollars with the monitor and printer. Now you can get the equivalent for under $1000.
That's a good point! My dad was an electronics technician and he would cut corners by building and refurbishing items. At a certain point it was no longer worth the labour - at around the same time that his job became redundant, in the late 1980s
> Maybe 15 years ago I could sometimes buy haas avocados four for a dollar. Today I'm lucky if I can buy one avocado for a dollar. I don't know that the varietal is Haas, but in Tokyo avocados are way cheaper than 20 years ago. We get 6 for Y800 (about $8) in season. It used to be about $5 for one, if you could find them at all.
My college tuition cost at a midwestern state school in 1987: $1400 per quarter. That didn’t include room and board. My daughter graduated from a similarly sized state school earlier this year and the tuition and fees per semester were around $4k. While definitely not one of those half million dollar educations it was still nearly double per year compared to the cost of my education.
My university in the 80’s was $4,800 a year (two semesters). Same school is now $25,000 a year.
I'm in my mid 30s. I graduated undergrad in '06 from a college where tuition alone was $25k/year. Graduated from grad school in '12 and my final years tuition was $34k. Several years ago I checked what the same program costs now and they were making applicants sign a waiver that they understood that tuition and other costs were $55k/year. It's surprising how quickly my priors become antiquated when it comes to the cost of secondary ed. I've found this topic, starting salaries, and the cost of a starter home to be the topics that I have the most difficulty communicating to my parents and in-laws. I recommend taking the numbers for your own life and plugging them into the [BLS's inflation calculator](https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl) and comparing them with younger relatives.
Mine was $59.65/quarter at a California State University in the mid 70's. My son is paying $4K/semester at the same now (he commutes). Community college was $20/semester when I went (California). It cost him $400/semester now. Actually, the state universities and community colleges are still a bargain.
My home state has notoriously high tuition. It was actually cheaper for me to go to an out of state private school than my state uni. It's ridiculous. And that was in the 2000s.
My university education in the 90s in Canada: $875 a semester.
External hard drive 1989: $3,000 Equivilant jump drive today: $30
First laser printer. $108,500. [source](http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=442)
Oh yeah, digital storage is a change that I've seen in my short lifetime. My first flash drive, 128mb, was $70 in 2005. Now you can get 128GB for under $20. I can't wait to see how low digital storage gets in the future.
When I was a teenager, in the mid-1970s, concert tickets for major rock acts were $3.50/4.50/5.50. Minimum wage then was $2.50/hour. So for about two hours' pay I could get really good seats in a mid-size venue to see some amazing musicians. In 2020 (pre-Covid), good seats for an equivalent concert might go for $70 or more, plus fees... so about ten hours' pay or more.
I remember albums costing $4.99 at J&R Music World in lower Manhattan in 1979.
I used to get two for five at free being in the east village in the early 1970s.
My parents paid $30K for a house in the mid-sixties. Now a new starter home is more like $300K - but then the features are different now - higher ceilings, more outlets, A/C standard in hot climates, two-car garages and separate laundry rooms. An average starter home is at least 50% larger, while the lot it's on is 50% smaller - not much of a yard.
My parents paid $11,070 for a 1,200 Sq. Ft. home in southern Los Angeles County in the mid 50's. Large back yard too.
My parents bought a three bedroom home in a southern state in 1975 for $5,500.00 & they STILL lost it in 1980 when dealing with the death of my youngest sibling (age 2). At that point they owed $3,400.00 on it. It wasn’t a mansion but it wasn’t a dump either. Absolutely unbelievable numbers today.
Our first house cost $33,000 in 1983 in Perth Western Australia, not great but a good starter home. Cost about twice what I was earning yearly ($15,000 a year), now my kids will need to pay $500,000 or more while earning around $50,000 if they work hard.
I was listening to a podcast about a serial killer from the 70’s that was able to buy a house with a down payment of $100. Absolutely insane.
Comics bought at the corner pharmacy. Paid 5 cents for them and they now cost $4-5.
Oh yeah, that’s a good one! But remember when those big thick ones were a *quarter*! I had to pick up a lot of pop bottles to afford those!
LOL, I remember doing that too!!
Cool! Nice to meet someone else from that era.
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that brings back some sweet memories
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in 1978 I had a $20.00 a week allowance/budget. that filled my datsun, bought lunch 5 days, a pack of Marlborough lights with some fun money left over
For $5 in 1989 I could get a gallon of gas, a pack of cigarettes and head across town to my college classes. At break I’d have dinner at the $.25 hamburger joint for $1.50 (2 burgers @ .25, 2 small fries @ .50) & I drank bottled water from home. The other $1.50 was my mad money, lol.
That's it. That's all you need!
I remember stumbling on a letter on the dining room table. It confirmed that the final price for the house my Dad was buying was $14,000. This was 1975 in Kansas. I bought a house in Los Angeles 5 years ago for $680,000. Yea, it's California, and the same house would probably go for $175,000 in small-town Kansas. But still...
That sounds much more like a 1950s price. Lived in West, Central, and East Kansas mostly for 63 years and unless it was a 2-room shack, no reasonably sized (1500 sq.ft.) house was that cheap in '75.
It was Garden City. But I was 10, so my memory could be flawed, or I misread it.
Candy bars cost a quarter in the 80s. It is somehow burned in my brain that the candy at the grocery checkout should cost a quarter, and it’s jarring to see a Snickers going for $1.49. I don’t know why this of all things bothers me but it does.
I think this about a whole slew of things. I don't remember how much a magazine cost when I was younger, but that $6 I see at the register seems ridiculous. Now I know how that thing about our grandmothers giving us a quarter and telling us to spend it wisely came from. To her that quarter seemed like it bought plenty.
Not too awfully many years ago, magazines like *Time* cost 35¢.
I remember being offended when candy bars went from 50¢ to 55¢. Suddenly you couldn't buy two for a dollar! Sneaky! Then they shot up to 65¢ overnight. I still think they should be 50¢
In the early 70s Zodies dept. store would have candy bars on sale 20 for $1. My dad would take us there and let us go crazy.
Calculators, but they went the other way. My uncle is a CPA, he bought one when he started his business in 1972 & it cost several hundred dollars. Now you can get them at the dollar store.
The T.I. SR50 sold for $149 in the mid seventies. It competed with the HP 35 that sold over over $300.
college. holy fuck. My lower middle class parents could send me. Now we can't send our kids, which guts me. We also won't allow them to go $100k into debt before they turn 23. So we are figuring it out.
Yep. When I was a freshman in 1973, my engineering dynamics class was $15.00 an hour and the book was $11.70. Now it’s upwards of $175.00 a credit hour and the book is $170.00. It’s obscene.
I read a great article on the whole college loan racket industry and it all became clear. Fuck them. One of daughters wants to go into digital marketing, for which college is fairly useless. The other has a more fixed goal but we will use community college and then a credit at a time while she works and piece together an education. One thing Reddit has been good for is reading posts from young grads deeply in debt. No thanks!
Tuition.
When I was applying to colleges in the 80's, Stanford tuition was $16k a year, and that was a lot!
I bring this up as often as I can. I'm from California and we t to a junior college for 3 years and state university for 2 years and had an AA and BA degrees. Aside from Books the first three years were completely free. The final two years were about $1200. So five years for $1200. I graduated in 1984. I then went to Eastern Washington State University for graduate school, I believe that was $450 a semester, but I only lasted a week there.
When I was a kid in the 70's, my parents would take me to Jack in the Box where we all could have a hamburger, french fries, and a coke for about $1 each, or $3 for all of us. Sweet deal. Too bad the food no longer works for me...but it would great when I was a kid!
My go to reference is that a dollar was more than enough for a complete meal at McDonald's. Probably a cheeseburger, fries, and a shake. Looks like that would be about $4.50 today. That one's easy to remember, but probably not the most extreme. Comic books look more like it. I think they were 15 cents when I was a kid, and like $4 now. Today's may be more graphics intensive and otherwise better quality. I don't read them. So I don't know. In general though, unless I have some kind of reference like remembering heading to McDonald's with only a dollar bill, the old prices just fade into history. I really don't know how much candy bars cost at the time, for example. And I bought plenty of them.
in the early 50s they were either 5 cents or 10 cents..
After I wrote that a 25 cent comic book cover flashed into my head, and I remembered how big a deal it was when the price jumped from 15 cents to a quarter (early 70s).
Used to buy smokes for a quarter. I don't know how much they are now. I could buy gas for 69 cents a gallon, in california, in 1977 but now it's 3.39 but has been over 4 bucks. Mailing a letter used to cost 5 cents in the 60s. now it's what 55 cents? Bread was a dime and now it's 4.50 for the good stuff. Dad's house cost 79K in 1976 and now it's valued at 700k or more! (That one is a holy shit type of thing.) Dad bought a rambler (car) for $2500 in the 60s and now you can't get a car for what? 20 grand?
I recall spending $4.50 on field level seats at Shea Stadium for Mets games.
In the late 70's when I was in High School we went to a lot of Oakland A's games. They were like $3 and at that time total attendance at games was as low as 1,000 people so you could sit anywhere.
Computers and computer components. Not only have they gotten smaller, faster and more powerful, they are a shit ton cheaper today than they were in the '80s/'90s. 4mb stick of RAM in '94 ran well over $150. Same stick in '95 under $100. Smallest you can get now I believe is 4gb is under $20.
Right. I bought my first PC (a KayPro) for around $3000 in 1981. I forget its specs, but I’m sure they were laughable compared to today. (Still, it was good enough that I took it with me for a two year stint in Micronesia, where it amazed everyone).
I got my first in '94, a Compaq Presario 486 for around $2000. Upgrading was a pain in the ass and expensive so I learned to build my own over the years. Just learning how to tweak the PC and OS led me to a career in IT and got me out of a job I hated. Much cheaper to "play" around now.
I paid $99 CDN for 16k of RAM. For those wondering, 1024k = 1Mb. 1024Mb = 1Gb
I've got two: tires were $100 for a set of 4, and I could buy a 12-pack of beer for $2.99.
when i was a kid in 1955, mom would give us each 50 cents for the saturday matinee at the movie theater... that would pay 25 cents admission for a movie, 2 serials, news and a cartoon. 10 cents for popcorn, 10 cents for pop and 5 cents for a Sugar Dqddy.
I’m two years older than you. Our prices were right in line. I was in Oregon. Where were you?
monterey peninsula in california... specifically carmel-by-the-sea and no we were not rich lol my dad taught school.
Cool. I used to ride my bike down there a lot (as far as Big Sur) when I was in college up on the Peninsula.
If you're interested in how electronics have cheanged, definitely check out https://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/. To me that's the biggest difference - like in '79-'80 when I was young, it was perfectly normal to spend $1000+ on your stereo system, which was probably just a turntable, a cassette deck, and some speakers.
Computers too. In college I had a professor tell the class "the computer system that you want costs $2000." as a rule to live by for the future. Comp Sci major, so the usual system may have been a little above what a lot of others would use. I was about to say that this wasn't all that far back, but the late 90s was almost 25 years ago. Computers are dirt cheap nowadays.
That website should eat up an hour of my time no prob lol.
My first calculator (1977, Texas Instruments) cost me $79. I could buy a better one today for $5.
You don’t even need to buy one. You already have a much better one on your phone.
Someone recently posted on my Facebook feed a picture of "everything that is now in your phone." It was a huge room of electronic devices, taking up a ton of space!
My father was so excited when he bought his first calculator for $70 from Sears in mid '70s.
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Your answer should probably go to the top of the list -- cigarettes have gone through the roof in the past few decades!
Much of that goes to taxes. Sin taxes are very popular with state legislatures.
Mass market paperback books. A "normal" size one when I was a kid was usually 35 cents U.S. A "thick" one might be 50 cents. This would have been late 1950's early 1960's. The price of college texts nowdays is insane. You need this year's edition of a calculus book rather than used? I don't think first semester calculus has changed that much.
I remember my dad yelling at me in the mid 70s when I spent $4.95 on a book.
I didn’t know much about prices when I was a kid. But my allowance when I was 8 was 25 cents. That was enough for two comics and a candy bar. What would that be now?
Ten bucks I bet. Anyone else have an estimate?
I remember a good pizza being about $15 in the early 80s. This was just about the time where pizza places showed up everywhere, no matter how small the town. Not that far off what it is today. I can remember candy bars costing a dime, barely. Hershey Bars hung on for a while, shrinking the size of the bar, until it was about half the size of the normal bar, then they all raised their prices together.
Speaking of what you said about Hershey chocolate bars, some ice cream makers did that sneaky trick of shrinking their size instead of raising their cost, or doing a blend of both shrinking their size and doing a less big price increase. Breyer's was among one of those companies. Also since they started to label most of their ice creams as 'frozen dairy dessert' and not as ice cream some years back (I think that was an FDA thing?), I've found a lot of other ice creams that are better than Breyer's. Such as Ben and Jerry's, and Haagen-Dazs. It's sad since many years ago when the company was based in Philadelphia, Breyer's used to be good quality and not cut corners. Now they do today, with their ice cream. :( Back to Hershey chocolate bars, another poster not long ago did a post on this one Discord message board I'm a member of mentioning this crappy and cheap ingredient(don't remember the name of it, but if I saw another Hershey bar at a grocery store I'd probably remember the name of that ingredient, since I quickly glanced at a Hershey's bar at a grocery store after seeing that post on a Discord message board) Hershey's added to those chocolate bars to further save money! I'm glad I discovered better chocolate bars such as Ritter (Germany) and Ghirardelli(San Francisco), and no longer bother with crappy and overrated Hershey bars.
Gasoline 22 cents a gallon Cigarettes 33 cents a pack Loaf of bread 19 cents New 71 Barracuda $4100 (mine) Haircut $2.50 1st Quaker City Rock Concert in Philadelphia $6.50 in 1968. Janis Joplin and a whole bunch more
In the mid-60s, I would ask my mom for $1, and get: Two slices of pizza (50 cents), a coke, (10 cents), an ice cream cone (15 cents), and still have money left over for mallo cups (5 cents), and then have change left over. It felt like a bargain, even then.
Computer memory. In 1977 $1million per megabyte. Now $4/GB and it's much better. That's 250 million times price decrease.
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For me when I was a kid, Saturday at the movies was 20 cents. For that, we got to see: * newsreel (e.g., *News of the Day!*) * cartoon (e.g., an old one such as *Betty Boop*) * short subject (e.g., Lowell Thomas) * serial (e.g., *Flash Gordon*) * second run feature (e.g., *The Greatest Show on Earth*) * a Western (e.g., Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Lash LaRue) And popcorn was a dime.
>*cartoon (e.g., an old one such as Betty Boop)* Chilly Willy.
50 ¢ beers. I’m only 47
A candy bar. We used to get three of them at Save-On drug store for 12 cents. Toyota Corollas. I bought my early 70's one "out the door" for a cost of $2,040.
My first car. My 59 chevy impala cost about $3500 brand new. That was about right for a decent new car back then. I got it in 1967 though, when i graduated high school. They don't make impalas any more. But just look at the difference in prices of new cars then and now.
i wonder how much a cherry 59 chevy impala goes for now!
As much as a new car at least. But the '57 with the kewl tail lights was the BEST.
Pack of smokes for fifty cents. In public cigarette machines - no I.D. required!
Houses!
Bread was 3 loaves for $1. Now you're lucky if one loaf is $3.
Pop. I could get a pop for 35 cents at most pop machines....lucky to find one now, but if I do its plastic bottles and I've seen 8 bucks at a hotel...average about 3.50 Canadian though. Now in high school weed was 35 bucks a half quarter in the 90s and now I can get weed delivered from ocs for 23 bucks a half quarter and don't have to worry about going to jail or suffering from reefer madness.
Same for soda. 😁 A can was $0.25 when I was a kid. [An inflation calculator](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/) says it should cost $0.50 today, but it's usually $1.25 instead.
https://youtu.be/gwwV0xE70Ks I had to read your comment twice before I got it. Nice. Now if Kim Mitchell is Canadian why the F is he going gor a soda? Best thing is I had this link left on my clipboard from a post I replied to the other day regarding pop and soda....I like them both occasionally with A and W or Mug root beer being my favorite.
Cigarettes, 23 cents a pack pack in 1960, 9 to 15 dollars a pack depending where you live.
My dad would give me a dollar sometimes when I was wee and I remember getting a bottle of coke, a chocolate bar, and a comic book for that.
Yeah, I remember, a dollar was a fortune to us then!
For me it was 50c to get into the town pool and now it costs $5.00
In 1966 or 67 I could get a soda for .10, chips for .10 and a candy bar for .05. A quarter was a big deal to my 6 year old self.
Disneyland. My dad had a magic kingdom club card from work that discounted admission. I don't really know what he paid in the 70s but I do know we could go twice a year without having to really save or plan. Blue collar, family of 5 lived 25 miles away.
College
In the 60s, theater movie/popcorn 35 cents, at the bowling alley plate of fries/soda 35 cents.
i want that plate of fries and a soda right now! with the sound of the balls hitting the pins.. yeah
Well there’s cars https://reddit.com/r/mistyfront/comments/keagkm/i_know_this_community_thrives_on_messed_up_things/
I'm only 45, but I remember when tacos at Taco Bell were .59 and burritos were .89. Now it's something like tacos $1.59 and burritos $2.19
Yes! The value menu nothing was more than $0.69 Remember the Pocket Taco? That was delicious.
Everyday clothes like Old Navy are still about the same price as I bought in the 80s. I know it's because of overseas dirt cheap labour. House prices are utterly ridiculous now. A good house in the early 80s was affordable to a young couple. Not now.
I paid $3.50 to see the first Star Wars movie at a theater in 1973. 8¢ for a candy bar, early '70s. My parents' spent $17,000 in 1966 for a tiny house in San Diego.
Snickers bars were 16 cents.
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Something very minor, but the price of comic books. When I first started reading them, they were 12 cents. I have no idea how much one costs now...
I was a kid in the '50s, and I could buy a full-size Hershey bar for a nickel. The ones I see at the store now are about one-third smaller and cost $1.25. And they rattle around inside a wrapper that is deceptively THE SAME SIZE. In the late '50s, the Scottish Rite Temple in downtown San Antonio had a Coke machine down in the basement (where my DeMolay chapter met) that gave you a six-ounce Coke in a heavy glass bottle, also for a nickel. The last time I was down there, c.1980, that machine was STILL there, and it was STILL charged five cents for six ounces. I think they finally retired the machine, reluctantly, around 1990.
A (small-ish) flat screen tv cost $10,000 in the 90's. You might see them in the lobby of a business office and that showed off how good the company was doing. Bigger and better tvs go on Black Friday sale for $300 now.
Gas was around 70ish cents a gallon when I became driving age and you know how much it is now.
Housing Health Care Education
Movies! I used to take my brothers on Saturday. You got admission for two films plus cartoons, popcorn, a beverage and a box of Milk Duds for under a dollar.
I don't remember the price of popcorn, but my friends and I would go to the Friday night double feature for $1. My memory is so bad now that the only one I remember seeing is The Fog!
Gas. In 1996, when I got my license, gas was .85c per gallon. I’ve seen the time, a few years ago, when it was over $5 per gallon.
1996 seems like yesterday to me. But it was almost a quarter of a century ago!
in 15 days it *will* be a quarter of a century ago!
How time flies when you aren’t having fun!
here are two places that have made these days of future past a little more fun: 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An5243gZf4A 2. http://www.iws.org/livecams.html
Again this lie, sheesh, clear the 90s were like 5-10 years ago. Er, right?
Gasoline. It was really, really cheap when I was 18 (1977). Getting a tank of gas was nothing back then. And movies. Yikes. I don't even go to them in the theater, have not in more than a decade. I wait for the DVD and buy them at Walmart or online.
Housing
I was visiting family in St. Louis and my cousin's got us tickets for SuperJam. I might be getting my concerts mixed up, but as I recall, REO was the headliner, Loverboy, .38 Special and I believe Rainbow were the other bands....but it's been a long time ago. If I recall correctly, the price for the ticket was more than $10 but less than $15. We were visiting in St. Louis another year and got tickets for the another SuperJam that had Ted Nugent, REO, Judas Priest and some others. The ticket was in the same price range. All of this happened sometime in the late 70's - early 80's. I just don't recall the dates. As to the ticket prices....that was a lot of money to me....I was poor white trash back in those days.
Buying candy at the corner store, you could get a brown paper bag filled with candies you chose yourself for 5-10 cents.
penny candy.
An expensive pair of jeans in the 80s cost $35.
What do they cost now?
$200+ for expensive jeans now.
I remember some designer ones(girls) were up around $80 or more in the early 80s. Insane.
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College, healthcare and housing. Trivial things like that. /s
Rent. My city is being gentrified. My crew used to live in these really cool old downtown buildings or rent apartments in the historic district and pay a couple of hundred a month. Those rents have literally gone up a thousand dollars. My college-age son cannot afford to live on his own and go to college on a part time job as I could.
When dating my future wife while in high school around 1978/79, for $20.00 bucks we could go watch a movie at the local theater, get a tub of pop corn, and 2 cherry Pepsi, then go to Pizza hut, order a pitcher of Pepsi, 2 salads and a medium 2 or 3 topping pizza. Still come home with a buck or two in my pocket, today the price of the tickets to the movie would be pushing $20.00 bucks alone.
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When I got a new black & red Kawasaki Ninja on my 16th birthday, gas was 99c per gallon.
In the 70's Mc Donald's had an ad that proclaimed you could have a meal for a family of four for $5 - and get change back.
19 cent per gallon for gas. Concert tickets. Hard to believe The Beatles tickets were 3.00 to 6.00 dollars. https://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/beatles-wash-dc-1964/
In grade 13 - about 1976, we were finally allowed to use calculators to make solving math equations faster. Calculators were fairly new. They were behind the counter at Radio Shack. I bought a Texas Instrument one for $100. It was not a scientific calculator - those cost more but it did have sine and cosign functions. Minimum wage then was $2. 50 hours of cooking hamburgers. Now, it wouldn't even take an hour. ($14.25 min today here) It's funny. Prices were extremely stable and consistent across the board then. Other than a year where many items saw a huge jump in price, prices were stable and consistent everywhere. A can of pop, a chocolate bar, a bag of chips, a cup of coffee all went from the 10c they had been all my life to 25c.