Living to be 60, along with inflationary trends, creates
some interesting memories of prices of yore. I remember the purple Lincoln four-cent
stamps—and the beautiful commemorative stamps, too. I routinely spent my
25-cent allowance on two comic books—which were all of 12 cents apiece. I
remember riding in the car and seeing gas selling for 26.9 cents a gallon.
Of course, money was worth more, too. You got 50 cents an
hour for babysitting and that was pretty useful cash. My brother and I would
wash Mr. Kramer’s Pontiac LeMans every now and then and split his whopping $3.00
payment. Wow.
As a young man, I earned $1.65 an hour as a bike messenger
in downtown San Francisco at the start of the 1970s. I could actually live on
that. A couple of years later, I shared
a three-bedroom flat in the upper Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco
for $198 a month — total — not each.
It goes on and on. I’ve gotten used to spending two dollars
for a cup of coffee (just the regular kind). Gas is more than $4.00 a gallon at
this writing. I’m also used to earning the equivalent of around $45 an hour,
too. I’m doing better, and the economy has, well, inflated.
This means that in my six-decades-old mind, things are
supposed to cost a particular amount. While I can deal with four-dollar gas,
sometimes a shirt at 75 dollars seems like just too much. But an iPod, which
didn’t exist when I was growing up, can be whatever the price should be—there’s
no basis of comparison. I do remember buying vinyl records at $2.98 at Long’s
Drug Store and 45 singles at Earl’s Music in Concord for a whopping $1.00. By
inflation’s standards, that single would be something like $8.00 today, right?
You can buy a song on iTunes for 99 cents today, so some things are actually
getting cheaper.
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