Comment on Damn! Food prices are as high as they were in the 90s! by saarnok

Parent Post: Damn! Food prices are as high as they were in the 90s! · In Reply To

saarnok · 8/24/2026, 1:46:02 AM · permalink

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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