Mention what you paid for a sandwich, and somebody over seventy will tell you what a sandwich used to cost.
They won’t approximate. They’ll give you a figure, to the cent, from fifty years ago, in the tone of a person reading off a receipt they still have.
The precision is the strange part. Ask what a sandwich cost in 1994, and they’ll shrug. Ask about 1968, and the number arrives immediately, with the name of the place attached to it.
Which suggests the memory was never about money.
People recall far more from roughly ten to thirty years old than from any other stretch of life.
It’s one of the sturdiest findings in memory research, and the best explanation is that those are the years somebody is assembling who they are, so the memories from then get kept.
The prices they know by heart are from exactly that stretch. They aren’t a list of things that got expensive.
Some of it is also simply correct, and the two are worth separating.
1. A candy bar
A nickel bought one, or a dime later on, depending on the year and the brand.
This is the first price anyone learns, and it gets learned around eight years old, standing at a counter with money that came from a chore or a grandmother or the sofa cushions.
What makes it stick is that the amount was payable. A whole object, obtained in exchange for one coin a child could close a hand around.
2. A year of college tuition
Three or four hundred dollars for a year at the state school. They’ll say the number and then wait, because they know what it does to a room.
The arrangement behind it was real. In 1979, a year of average tuition took about 385 hours at minimum wage, and a full-time summer came to 480. A student could work June through August, pay the year, and have money left.
That’s what people mean when they say they worked their way through. They aren’t exaggerating.
Though the comparison uses the federal minimum wage and the published price, so it leaves out financial aid and leaves out the states that pay more. The direction isn’t in dispute. The figure itself is generous.
What the price measures is a promise. Not that college was inexpensive, but that ordinary work bought it, and a teenager with no family money had a route in.
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3. A gallon of gas
Twenty-five cents, or thirty depending on the year, and under a dollar well into the eighties. They can tell you when it crossed.
Gas comes up more than anything else, and it gets heard as a complaint about the pump. It isn’t one.
At a quarter a gallon, a sixteen-year-old with four dollars had a full car and an afternoon. That covered the distance to the next county, out of one week of bagging groceries.
So the price isn’t measuring fuel. It’s measuring distance, and how much of it a person could have without asking anyone’s permission.
4. A postage stamp
Six cents, then eight. They know it because they bought them in sheets.
A stamp was the price of reaching a person. Not quickly and not reliably, but at all.
Reaching somebody is now free and instant and available to everybody who has a phone.
And the letter died anyway. Nobody writes them now, which is the part they mean when they bring up the stamp.
5. A wedding
Two hundred dollars. A church hall, a punch bowl, and somebody’s mother made the cake.
This one is personal, from their own day, and they hold it the way people hold their own address.
Which is the pattern showing itself. Researchers at Leeds had people write twenty statements starting with I am, pick three of them, and work out when each of the three became true. The median age came back at just under twenty-three.
Twenty-three is also roughly when that generation married. So the wedding figure sits in the same drawer as everything else they consider central about themselves.
The other thing it measures is an expectation rather than a price. Weddings didn’t get more expensive because flowers did.
They got more expensive because a wedding stopped being an afternoon in a hall and turned into a production with vendors. Nobody in 1971 was renting anything.
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6. A cup of coffee
A dime bought coffee, and it also bought the chair. A person could sit in a diner for two hours on one cup with a newspaper, getting refilled without asking, and nobody came over to see whether they were finished.
The chair was free because the room wasn’t worth anything. Now the room is the product and the coffee is the entry fee.
Four dollars is fair for ninety minutes of a seat, a table, and a bathroom in a building paying commercial rent. The math holds up.
They’re not wrong that something was taken away. They’re wrong about what it was.
7. A movie ticket
A dollar fifty, and that included whatever was playing before the main feature.
The ticket price stands in for the category an evening out belonged to.
Two people could see something and eat afterward on the money from one shift, without anybody deciding in advance that the night was going to be an event.
Now the price sorts it into the class of occasions, and occasions get planned, and most of the planned ones never happen.
8. A haircut
Two dollars, and they’ll name the barber.
A haircut is nothing but a person’s hour. No factory can make one more efficiently, no version of it gets built overseas and shipped over, no software does it overnight while the barber sleeps.
What a haircut comes to is what an hour of somebody’s working life comes to, plus rent on the room they stand in.
So it follows wages and rent and nothing else, and it has climbed the way wages and rent have climbed.
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9. A starter home
Eighteen thousand dollars, or twenty-two. Three bedrooms, a garage, and a street where other young families were doing the same thing in the same year.
Here the sticker shock is simply accurate.
As recently as 2000, two-thirds of large markets had homes selling for under three times a household’s yearly income. By 2019, the national ratio was 4.1. In 2022 it reached 5.6 times median household income, the highest on record going back to the early seventies.
A starter home went from around three years of income to more than five, and it happened inside the span of one working life.
10. A hospital stay
They’ll tell you what it came to when their first child was born, and it will be under two hundred dollars, and it will include the days in the hospital afterward.
This one has a name attached. They remember it because of who was sick, and what happened, and whether the family could pay.
The shock has a different shape than the others. It isn’t that the number went up. It’s that the number stopped being knowable at all.
Nobody today can say what a night in a hospital comes to. Not the patient, not the doctor, often not the billing office until weeks afterward.
The price arrives after the fact, in a document nobody can read, and it changes depending on who employs you.
What they’re remembering is a price that existed in advance, as a number a person could be told.
The other column
There’s another side to this, and it isn’t small. Plenty of things got cheaper over the same years: food, clothes, a plane ticket, a phone call across the country.
So they aren’t imagining it, and they aren’t only complaining. There’s a plain reason some prices exploded, and others didn’t.
Anything a machine can make got cheaper. Anything that comes down to a person’s time, a piece of land, or a room in a building did the opposite.
A haircut, a hospital stay, a house: nobody can build those faster or ship them in from overseas, so they only ever got more expensive.
The prices they’ve kept are all the second kind. Nobody memorizes the price of something that went right.
