How much did things cost years ago?

I was born in 1950 but was discussing going to the movies as a kid and what it cost, so I looked up 1957 and found that:
a new house cost $12220.00
average yearly wage was $4550.00
gas was .24 cents

Kind of a neat web site (didn't see the movie costs, but I'm sure I could get a soda and a popcorn for a quarter)

http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1957.html

On Wednesdays, admissino was 15 cents.

A candy bar was 5 cents.

A quarter got you admission, popcorn and a drink

during the school year. Ten movies for a dollar. That's a dime per movie.

About 1957.

Bananas were 9cents per pound.

Popsicles a nickel.

My mother used to give me a quarter to ride my bike to the store and get her a pack of cigarettes. Sometimes they would just charge it and she would pay when she came in on Friday.

Real sugar!

The coke tastes like crap nowadays unless you get the stuff from Mexico with the real sugar. Our local store gets that once in a while.

my home town. The movie was 15 cents and popcorn was a dime. If I had an extra nickel, I got a tube of Necco wafers -- saving the pale brown chocolatey ones 'til last.

Sometimes the movie was a double feature. If I was lucky, one of the actors was Randolph Scott. *sigh*

that Necco later came out with all chocolate rolls.

soldiers carried Neccos during the Civil War! They were invented in 1847!

So why did it take them so LONG to come up with the all-chocolate ones?

The purple ones were supposed to taste like cloves. No wonder we didn't like them.

14) when my parents were at a picnic. The gas tank was almost empty and I pulled into a gas station (no self-service then) and asked for a dollar's worth of regular (as opposed to Ethel :7). My friend freaked out saying No! That's too much! Your mom will know we had the car! Too late. Got a little over a half tank (Chevy Nova). Cigarettes were under .50 a pack. I could go on but it's too depressing...

a pack, $2.00 a carton.

I paid for these by waiting tables at 65 cents per hour (in meal tickets)(and cigarettes). College job.

One of the cigarette companies always provided free cigarettes (in cute little boxes that held four or five each) beside every plate at the formal affairs at the college. Free samples! Oh boy! Only took me forty years or so to quit.

of who we were has become such a pariah. I remember smoking EVERYWHERE, and when you visited peoples' homes who didn't smoke, they always had ashtrays out for the smokers. We'd smoke away and they wouldn't be fanning the air and coughing. Now you can't even smoke OUTSIDE in some places, and some entire residential buildings are non-smoking (and all businesses).

So happy you quit. :thumbsup: I'm trying. Again. :eyes:

started really yearning to achieve the status of a non-smoker, and the patch finally helped boost me into that status.

Felt really good to say "Non-smoking" to the airline ticketperson!

Twenty years a non-smoker now, and I just wish I had the money I spent on cigarettes.

LOVED being a non-smoker. You don't realize how much cigarettes control your life. AND it was relatively easy. Didn't miss it at all. Didn't bother me if people came over and smoked or smoked in my car. In didn't go "ewwwww" smelling smoke on somebody. So when I started again (I found a pack at home and thought it would be amusing if I smoked one :eyes: - that's all she wrote), in the back of my mind I thought I could quit again no problem-o. I used the patch, too -- (and at the time, patches were more expensive than cigarettes - not any more!). I've tried several times since, even going a week or two longer on the patch -- and again, RELATIVELY easy. But invariably after my "treatment", I cave. Can't explain it (besides lack of will power). I wish I knew what that button was in our brains that clicks sometimes and make something easy to achieve - exercise, dieting, etc. It's elusive and if I could isolate and trigger it, I'd apply it to all aspects of my life.

This pay day I'm planning on getting another supply of patches, and forging ahead. Looking forward to it because smoking has become such a hassle and if I pay under $8 a pack, I think I got a deal! :eyes:

Thanks for the support! :pals:

in a theater without having a nicotine fit!!! Came as a big surprise to me to realize this was why I hated going to movies when I was a smoker.

Re the patches -- I had a good friend who offered to loan me the money to buy them and I could pay her back out of the money NOT spent on cigarettes, and it worked. Am a cheap Scotsman, and simply couldn't see myself paying her back AND paying for cigarettes too!

I can't tell whether the e-cigs are intended to help people quit, or just make "smoking" "vaping?" socially acceptable.

You'll get there. Obviously you really want to get off the damn things, and you will! (hugs) -- k

it just seemed that everything was more in proportion.

Banks/Businesses/Corporations were satisfied making a little profit from a lot of business.

Not Making 100%+ profit from only a few sales.

I was married in 1964. Out 1st appt. rent was $75.00, our electric bill was $5.00/mo. and after our son was born in 1965 my weekly grocery budget was $10.00/wk and included baby food, Similac formula, and several packs of ciggaretts which cost 25 cents a pack. I bought a monthly bus pass to go to work in the city for $20.00.

IF I had 5 bucks in my pocket on a Saturday nite, I was rich. Enough to get into a dance place, with a live band playing. Enough to pool money for the illegal brew or two. Emough for a snack on the way home. Gas 30 cent per gallon. Nixon was being a prick. I was arguing with my dad over 'Nam. But in '72 he had a revelation, after the news he told me that "if you're drafted for this shit hole war, I'm sending your ass to Canada".
He was pure GOP and which made me pure DEM, just with his blind trust in the pricks! Thanks dad.

in the suburbs of Miami for $7,000 in the early '50s. It later sold for $70,000 in the '80s.

Cigarettes were a quarter a pack. Bread was still a nickel a loaf.

And yeah, my first car was a Volvo.

:rofl:

a little over $4000, had 12 miles on it. I remember as a teen, we would go out and pick up pop bottles along the highway and turn them in for deposit. THAT was our week-end gas money.

At his professional, but entry level salary.

My very similar (3-BR ranch style) house bought in 2007 cost me 5 years salary in my professional and long past entry level career.

The difference between the actual costs - my house was over 21 times the amount they paid.

can't remember the year but 1968 sounds about right. Also, I could fill my VW and drive it for a week for about $2.00.

Computers cost more, and took up entire rooms. :)

ratio that the price of a gallon of milk, a newspaper and a stamp and other staple units would be about the same. Not an index but symbolic fidelity to a base value for the currency in regard to actual spending power. Indexing means none of the masses actually leaps ahead much but general prosperity might do that trick in the big picture. Argentina reformed its currency by creating a new currency indexed just like that so they knew the money had an actual real world value. You can't eat an ounce of gold.

By the way stamps are generally less than newspapers(that funds the entire postal system and they want to shut us down!) and perform the same service as always. The thin newspapers can hardly claim the same and bread and milk much less the gas? That seems downright ominous.

but tuition at the University of Minnesota was only $375.
You could get a pair of Levis for $7, but if you were cheap, you would buy jeans at Penney's for $5.

However, pantyhose, which were relatively knew, cost $2.00 a pair, and the cheapest component stereo was $200.00.

Yet if you rented an apartment, you figured $100 per bedroom.

In 1973, I went to New York City with the Cornell Chorus. When my mom cleaned out her house to go into assisted living, we found a postcard that I had written on that trip. I was indignant at the prices in New York--why, they had charged $2.80 for breakfast! (That year, I could buy a weekend's worth of basic groceries--things that could be cooked with a hot plate and toaster oven in a dorm room--for $5.00.)

Everyone was shocked when gas went up to 60 cents a gallon during the Arab oil embargo.

Tuition, room, and board my senior year of college in Minneapolis was $2700.

In graduate school, I felt that I was really affluent, because I was awarded a fellowship that paid a $300 a month stipend. But then inflation struck, and they raised it to $350 in my last year.

We moved into that house as newlyweds, raised two wonderful children in it and still live here. Our 20 year mortgage payment was $102.65.

I remember putting 5 gallons of gas in the car and paying a buck for it. I also got my windshield washed, my oil checked along with my tire pressure and I got a free drinking glass! And my gas was pumped by an attendant!

I could buy a week's worth of groceries including soaps, detergent and paper products for $25.00.

This week I saw gas prices rise 20 cents within the span of two days to $3.59 for a gallon of regular. I got two lightly packed bags of groceries that were mostly produce and deli items for $35. That's a lot of money for someone who is on a fixed income as most of us are.

station wagon in 1972. Huge engine, all the bells and whistles, under $5000.

Gas in 1973 just before the OPEC Embargo, 29.9.

Bread 10 cents a loaf in the late 60's.

I made $2.20 an hour working at an amusement park in 1976.

I went to many movies for somewhere between .50 and a buck in those days.

Eggs at .28 cents a dozen would be $2.25 today. Average wage back then was $4550.00 which in 2009 dollars would be $34,738.20.

"The national average wage index for 2009 is 40,934.93 in the US,"

http://www.newsoxy.com/business/average-us-wage-15437.html

About the only item that appears to cost much more today then in 1957 in 2011 dollars is gas.