Lunch for 25 cents

I was thinking tonight as I watched the news and the gloom and doom reminders that everything, especially food and gasoline, is getting more expensive. No, everything IS NOT getting more expensive.

So as I watched and the newscaster was giving a few examples of how prices have increased over the past year, I thought back to when I was a single, working girl having to pay for so many things myself, and I was earning $60 per week. Not a bad wage in 1961.

I had no car, but I had car fare (bus fare) which ran me a total of $2.20 per week. I could pack my lunch or buy something. I preferred to stop for breakfast at Schraft's and get an English muffin, two eggs over easy, a bottomless cup of coffee (coffee was 10 cents a bottomless cup back then), and three strips of bacon for 99 cents. If I didn't pack my lunch I could get a hot-dog on a bun with whatever toppings I wanted and a soft-drink for 25 cents. So, I would say that food ran me about $7.00 per week. Uncle Sam took $14 (social security tax and income tax). I gave my mom $10 for room and board. Tithe was $6.00, so I was left with about $21, from which I put $2 a week into a Christmas Club fund.

Of the $21 remaining I set aside as much as I could for the upcoming college expenses of books and transportation. My tuition was covered with a scholarship.

Now, let's review, so you can see how much prices have REALLY increased over the past years. Coffee -- 10 cents a cup. This price held up pretty much until the mid-60s, then it went up to a quarter, and this country almost went to war with itself at that jump in price! Gas went from 25 cents a gallon to 50 cents a gallon, but it was a slow climb in those five years, so no one complained.

You need to remember, though, that a car's tank held approximately 12 gallons of gasoline, and cars got 8 to 10 miles per gallon of gas, so fill ups were more frequent than they are today. A fill-up of $5.00 would get you perhaps 100 miles. A fill-up today of $50 will get you, if you don't have an SUV, about 350 miles. If we are cost comparing, we should get 1,000 miles on a fill-up, right? So I would say that gasoline is really a wallet buster.

Now, phone calls are still holding at about the same rate -- I'm talking about long distance. Now that we can bundle and get unlimited long distance for $25 a month or whatever, I wouldn't even think of comparing, because in the "old days" you paid for each call and long distance was very, very expensive. I can recall some phone bills I had to reimburse my dad for (from talking with Alan at Rutgers) that were as high as $25 for one call, said call being about one hour long.

Other items have decreased since the 60s -- calculators for instance. When they first came out with a small, almost hand-held calculator (it was billed as being able to be held in your hand, but it really was a bit heavy for a one-hand hold) it cost $168. I know this because I balked at the price when Alan HAD TO HAVE one. Now you can get them for, what, $3?

Wrist watches are so cheap you can throw them away rather than replace the battery which costs about the same as a new watch. The wind-up kind we had (and which I still have) cost at least $15 and that was a Timex.

So, while we complain about the rising cost of gasoline and food, we should be thankful for those things which really have gone down in cost and price throughout the years -- TVs being another one of those items. Computers? Our first computer cost us $12,000 it only did what we paid for it to do, that is word processing. Alan's first Apple cost $3,000 and it had 48K of memory!

So be thankful when you're filling that tank. Don't kick the car or the pump. Some things are a lot less expensive than they used to be.