Part I
ITEM: My family settled into a house in the 1950’s that featured three bedrooms, French doors with lead-glass panes separating dining from the first living room, a second living room, and electric sconces around both. It had a semi-finished attic, a garage, and a tiny back yard. I don’t know what the down payment was, but my father affirmed that he took possession with a $5,000 mortgage.
ITEM: As a 20-year-old I was unsettled and upset when the price of blue jeans went to $20 and a year or two later the price of a Volkswagen bug almost doubled, to $2000, in one swoop.
ITEM: At the age of 30-something I was positively gobsmacked when new cars started hitting the streets at $20,000. “The price of a modest house,” I murmured to a friend—this was in the Philadelphia metro area, however, so I accepted with resignation that houses thereabout would be three or four times what they were in an upstate region whose industries had already largely gone under.
ITEM: Candy bars and store cupcakes shrank in size and their prices went up, and up, and up. But, when I was a kid and had started having coins in my pocket, they cost 5 or 10 cents.
By the way, typewriter keyboards used to include a symbol for “cents.” It resembled a capital C with a line stroked through.
ITEM: As a 50-year-old I took my car to a mechanic and asked for a tune-up—new plugs and wires, the works. I used to do such things—you could buy a set of spark plugs, a “distributor” or rotor cap, “points” (which I won’t explain here), and spark plug wires by the foot for about twenty dollars. Then if you had a spark plug socket, you could pull out the old plugs, set the proper gap in the new ones with a set of feeler gauges, cut new wires to length, and—if you could borrow someone’s timing light—get the engine firing just so. But as I grew older I left various tools and practices behind me; I hadn’t done that for years. So, I almost choked when my mechanic presented me with a bill for $500. The wires? They were molded now, and very, very pricey. The timing? With electronic ignition, that could only be done by the one guy in the area who owned the computer necessary.
Now, I am singing the song of old guys: Why, when I was a boy, blah blah blah. I know I am. The “old guys” of my boyhood—who, when I considered them old, were twenty or thirty years younger than I am now—would get together and sing that song, in their case about the good old days of the Depression.
Fast food franchises started growing around the country like funguses, and mirabile dictu, even my upstate home town was treated to a glass-walled emporium selling fifteen-cent hamburgers—ten cents less than you’d pay in a diner. But the old guys pooh-poohed. “What you used to get for fifteen cents wasn’t one of these paper-thin things. A hamburger was like that,” demonstrating with a ring made by two thumbs, two index fingers.
Well, they were right about prices ever increasing. There are reasons that account for some of it.
The first big reason: Products improve. New houses today average twice or three times the floor space of those built after WWII ended in 1945, which were 600 to 800 square feet. And today’s home are far better insulated.
The car I ordered a tune-up for didn’t really need it; the electronic ignition was far more reliable. It’s also no longer necessary to change engine oil to a thinner viscosity in cold weather, a thicker one for summer: Motor oils have been multi-viscosity for decades. I notice that my cars—always used when I get them—nevertheless go with far fewer breakdowns. When I started driving in the mid-60s, I sat behind the wheel of junkers with 100,000 miles under their rusted frames. Now, that mileage is still the point where I buy, but I expect to find one with no rust, with its original paint in good shape, and years of service ahead of it.
We could find hosts of things which are vastly upgraded (bicycles, watches, batteries, eyeglasses, music reproduction, tires) and better, or at least bigger (which isn’t at all the same thing) (although refrigerators are) than the things that preceded them. I really appreciate color-fast and permanent-press clothes. New blue jeans used to run like crazy; washing a new pair with a load of regular laundry used to dye everything light blue.
I don’t hold Progress in the awe it seemed to have for generations before mine, but that’s another subject. I just want to acknowledge the hosts of people engaged in research aimed at improving everything you can think of, that you use every day. (Did you know there are textile engineers?). They tinker, they try, they toy with. They need a lot of education—and when all their successes are put together, things are different from before.
So I drive the improved car, walk in the better shoes, and peddle the upgraded bicycle. Thanks guys (bytheway, “guys” as I use it is genderfree).
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But there’s another reason prices creep ever up. I’ll address that in Part II