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Parent Post: Damn! Food prices are as high as they were in the 90s!
babyvaso
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8/22/2026, 11:19:06 PM
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Because I like to do mental field trips late at night on media from the 70s to 90s I often think to myself, is the cost of living higher than it was in the 90s, or rather, the amount of necessities required from us have gone up giving the impression of a higher cost of living? I turned 16 in 2005, I didn't have my first personal phone until 2010 I was already an adult. Even at this time I could reasonably walk into a Nursing home and ask for a job, be given a paper application, sat outside the facility to fill the paper, and give it to the manager on duty. Riding the bus was far more common place none of this forced car nonsense we have today. All your entertainment came from Cabal and you paid per view. I could go on and on. I paid 70 USD in 2000 for Legend of Zelda, Majora's mask, 26 years later people say 70 USD for a game is too expensive? LOL! When you have more necessities yeah you're going to have reduced free income.
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saarnok
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8/24/2026, 1:46:02 AM
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I don't know that things are genuinely comparable at any level. I was an idiot back in the 80s with how I used money, especially as relates to food. Back then my minimum wage job wouldn't pay for the most basic fast food meal with an hour's work. I once told a young person how they could eat at Costco for a couple of bucks if they needed to. They were actually too stupid to pull it off. Directions: "Walk in the customer service door, go back to the food court, order food, pay for it." Nope. Too complicated for them. I often decide to grab a quick bite when I leave the house. I don't get a $20 dollar burrito. I get a $1.50 burrito or sometimes two of them. I remember noticing that media, such as tapes or CDs were generally about $20 a unit. In fact I paid significantly more for my first CDs sometime in the 80's. Games were definitely an exception to that, and the few I actually bought were something like 55-60 bucks. But, I really wasn't interested in the games they were producing at the time for the most part, so I never got into it. I still buy movies, but instead of $20 I usually pay closer to $5. Now, if you go back to roughly 1980 the cost of buying a movie was usually more like $100 or more. Then, talk about clothes. I worked on a farm/ranch and grew up running heavy equipment and welding more or less for free. My parents bought all my clothes when I was young, and when I started buying my own it was about $20 for jeans and $20 for shirts. Today, they're more like $30. Minimum wage was $2.25 then and it's $15 now. But, rent was really cheap back then. And the stuff for rent was really lowball stuff and if you had a problem with the place that was just too bad for the most part. Now, I know landlords who MUST go to any expense to deal with their renter's complaints and it takes up to a year of not collecting rent to evict them. Sort of explains why rents are so high. Appliance prices are ludicrous. You can get a dishwasher today for less than my mom paid for one in the 70s. You can buy a microwave for under $100 and the one on my countertop from 1984 cost closer to $400. Of course mine will still be working when that new one dies, so we're not really talking about the same stuff. The toaster I use cost $26... in 1926, an actual century ago and you can buy a new toaster today for $15-$16. Again, my century old toaster will still be working when that new one goes into the landfill. I sort of think we might as well be comparing different fictional universes.
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