Some things do get cheaper, and some things...

[jim_p]

For reasons that I may make clear in another posting, I was in the market for a stereo receiver. Just a plain old receiver with a tuner and amp that I could also plug a CD/DVD player, tape deck, TV audio, and maybe a turntable into. I didn't need no fancy 6.1 sound, didn't need anything bundled with speakers (got 'em already), didn't need "Home Theater". Just. A. Receiver.

Believe it or not, I finally found exactly what I was looking for at Radio Shack of all places. For $99. Not bad.

That price took me back to college daze, circa 1980. I was an MIT froshling, naive in the ways of the world and of economic reality, but I wanted some sound for my dorm room. Being not of unlimited means, I wandered into one shop and asked if I could be set up with a modest system including turntable, tuner, and tape deck for around $200. I could almost feel the disdain radiating from the staff of that establishment, informing me coolly but politely that no, such a combination was Simply Impossible in that price range. I retreated, feeling most humbled and chastened.

Back to the present day. Having secured the tuner for $99, just for grins I went and shopped around for the other components. Turntable - $99. Dual cassette deck - $99. Speakers - $60 for a pair that would suffice for a dorm room.

Final price tag: $357. For a system that would have been Really Nice for me to have back as a froshling.

Then I find an inflation calculator on the Web, and find that this would have been $160 in 1980 dollars.

FWIW, that same calculator says that the $2.13 I'm paying for gas now would have been $0.95 in 1980
which is about spot-on if I remember correctly...

Comments

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

Final price tag: $357. For a system that would have been Really Nice for me to have back as a froshling.

Then I find an inflation calculator on the Web, and find that this would have been $160 in 1980 dollars.

Yeah, but that doesn't mean that's what they would have been charging for it in 1980. :-}

[jim-p.livejournal.com]

Well that's kinda the point really, sorry I wasn't clear enough. Just as the real price of computers has come way down since 1980 (a $200 PDA has several times the processing power of any PC you could buy in 1980), the real price of stereo equipment has come down as well (just not quite so dramatically). The system I priced out at $357 today probably would have gone for $600 or so in 1980...

And on the flip side, even though the real price of gasoline is now the same as it was back then, people are outraged that it's suddenly so sky-high (probably because the cost of cars has risen much faster than inflation...)

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

well, there's also the fact that around 1998 gas prices were at historic *lows*. Adjusted fro inflation, gas was much cheaper then than even the much vaunted 1950s when the stuff was a quarter a gallon. I remember filling up for 80 cents a gallon in south Jersey at one point. Maybe even less. Then it seems overnight the price of gas more than doubled.

[jim-p.livejournal.com]

Actually, I was a bit off; we were already well over $1/gal in 1980. An interesting bit of historical perspective can be found at:

http://money.howstuffworks.com/gas-price1.htm

So it turns out that in real terms gas prices peaked in 1980; we were paying the equivalent of about $2.59/gal in today's dollars. Although their chart tops out in 2001, the difference in CPI between then and now is only about 4%, so the numbers are a good first approximation to today.

On the other hand, I realized the other day that you pretty much have to be over 40 to have lived through the first Arab oil embargo and the resulting shortages and price shocks (at least to have actually remembered them). An awful lot of the twentysomething and thirtysomething SUV soccer-mom brigade literally have no experience of expensive oil; by the time they started driving it was cheap again.

I have a button that says We are going to keep on repeating history until we get a passing grade. Seems apropos now.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

heh, yeah. at 38 I remember gas lines, but just barely. When I bought my Saturn in 1998 people asked why I wanted such a small car, and I was thinking, "Man, just one more oil embargo and all of you with your monster SUVs are going to be crying like the people with their big cars were in the 1970s." Lo and behold, I was right.

[quietann.livejournal.com]

For some reason that California ad with the license plate "SAV NRG" keeps popping into my head. At 40, I do remember the oil embargo, my mom fussing at us to turn off the lights, dammit, and when the gas stations stopped giving away glasses and stuff with every (cheap) fill-up (we used the glasses from Mobil until I was 30; they were high quality giveaways!). More personally, I remember that suddenly I couldn't buy as many Breyer plastic horses, as the price went from about $2 to $10 almost overnight.

I don't get the SUV thing at all. I hear that sales of new SUVs are way off all of a sudden. Gee, I wonder why! My one regret over buying a Protege instead of another small car is that the gas mileage isn't that great.

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

I'm 33 and I remember lines and odd/even days for buying gas.