A 1945 photograph shows two women displaying what $1.34 could buy in 1918 and 1945.
by ashelypics
A 1945 photograph shows two women displaying what $1.34 could buy in 1918 and 1945.
by ashelypics
42 Comments
Today we can get a loaf of the worst bread for $1.34 if it’s marked down.
2026: 1/3 of a gallon of gas
As a millennial, I’m quite offended by this picture. So you are telling me that between 1918 and 1945 the cost of living for staple foodstuffs actually went down. Not just down, but down dramatically.
Way to rub it in our faces and call it history.
How our approach to food changed – 5 lbs sugar is more than I use in 2-3 years these days.
Hopefully by 2045 we too can reduce prices like they had
$1.34 in 1946 is about $23 today. 1945 was obviously a special situation, and the cap on prices was because of rationing.
People use to dress really nice in public
Even back then, price propaganda was common. According to the Keokuk, Iowa July 13, 1918 edition of the Gate City and Constitution-Democrat newspaper, a five pound sack of granulated sugar was 48 cents.
That needs to happen now
So how much would that have cost 100 years prior? -.35 cents?
Maybe I didn’t look hard enough, or maybe its shrinkflation, but I can’t find a 5 lb bag of regular sugar. Sure I saw fancy ass sugar for nepo babies, but where’s the 5 lb bag? We got jacked up prices on 20 oz tins of sugar, 4 lb bags, 10 lb, bulk 20 and 25 lb bags, but no 5 lb anymore. And a 4 lb bag will run you about $3.07. Doing some math’s, that’s somewhere in the field of $3.84 for a 5 lb bag (if it exists). 187% increase from 1918, and 1100% increase from 1945.
Cool to see lady on the left attempting to mimic fashion from 1918 too. It’d be like someone today dressing like 1999.
Before corporate greed took completely over.
Maybe I missed the point. Why are these women walking down a busy street with these signs and the groceries as a visual? Are they protesting something?
Ive seen this picture quite a few times, but it always looks fake. The multiple fonts and bad capitalisation really stand out as AI generated.
I would be interested in seeing the ‘18 prices for the items on the right. This could just be that the OPA capped the sugar prices and the other items on the right went up from 18 to 45. Or maybe sugar prices just came down/ were especially high in 1918 because of the WW1 rationing.
This could be like me showing a big screen TV from 2001 and a big screen TV now and showing all the other stuff I could buy now with the difference.
So that was the last time prices went down? This image makes no sense to me
They had to ration food. The price was low but you couldn’t get any. Price controls cause scarcity but at least it makes people feel good while they wait in line for sugar
Probably not enough to buy the materials to make that sign these days!
Prices going down over that period of time is a horrible thing, yall. Inflation just needs to be controlled, which it is assuredly not in modern life.
Would love to see that again today with food prices
Someone needs to add in a woman today with 1.48 of groceries to really show how far we’ve dropped.
The same amount could buy an olympic swimming pool of gasoline, but I assume it was too inconvenient to display it
Edit: /j
This is the problem of capitalism. Inflation is *necessary* for its reproduction. Which is why if you don’t get yearly raises where you work, you are very seriously making less and less every year. Nothing can be stagnate, or there will be a depression which is materially far worse than inflation. If there isn’t growth and expansion, it’s death for capital. There will never be a “fair wage,” for the working class because the whole system demands debt as profit from the future. It’s kind of completely horrifying when you really think about it. It’s already the end of the world, and we’re like a cartoon character running in mid-air who hasn’t realized it yet.
This special exception was only made because capitalism was “paused” while the whole world was being torn asunder by multiple World Wars. Ironic then that the MAGA diehards want to return to a time when Capitalism was cancelled, lol.
That is a propaganda photo for the Office of Price Administration that regulated prices during WWII. Those were artificially low prices subsidized and regulated. The organization became increasingly unpopular after the war (amongst the workers and businesses it was mostly affecting) and was dissolved in 1947 after losing democrats a swath of elections. The straw that arguably broke the camel’s back was the Meat Packers Union which slowed slaughtering rates and threatened to remove meat from shelves completely if the price controls stayed.
It was wartime law that prevented strikes of this nature until 1945, but the law could not survive once unions and workers were free to act again.
Inflation.
Yesterday I bought two six packs of Oikos yogurt and one stick of deodorant and it was $30
Minimum wage was .40 cents an hour in 1945.
That’s a lot of inflation. How much was the average salary?
Just bought 1kg of sugar for 1.25$ in Canada we’re going backwards
Give some credit here to the rising tide of mechanization on the farm. A man with a tractor can produce for more food than a man with a plow and a team of mules.
Meanwhile I’m pretty sure that if I bought everything on that sign on the right I’ll have to pay at least €~~45,-~~ 20-30
When my Dad cleaned out my Grandmother’s house (she died at 101 years old), he found old ration coupons from the OPA program.
You can do the same thing with many modern conveniences. In 1984 I paid nearly $2K for a desktop computer that had two 360k floppy drives, 16k of RAM, and a monochrome monitor. Today you can buy a cell phone that has many times the computing power for $200.
I remember my Gramdparents renting a 2 bedroom house in 1987 for 350.00 a month. I also remember them shitting a brick in 89 when it got raised to 375.00.😂 Everything is relative to its times I suppose.
Didn’t know the OPA was around then
https://i.redd.it/x5tmvcb7i5zg1.gif
Per the net, “Sugar was expensive in 1918 primarily due to severe wartime shortages, shipping disruptions caused by World War I, and high inflation.”
nothing cost that now. nothing…
At my local grocery store I can’t even get a gallon of milk that’s reduced price because it’s going to expire in a day for $1.34.
Got some rough info for them about 2026, though I guess the Twix bar wasn’t invented yet so at least it’d be something novel to hand them a single candy bar.
I’m gonna be honest – I bet sugar was a lot easier to produce in 43.
the lady on the left is giving me serious i had to walk three miles uphill both ways for this sugar energy