This is for the new collectors out there who may be amazed at old toys they find with the original price tags still in place.
(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53194950645_9666cbdeea_o.jpg)
McDonalds Menu - Early 1970's
This was just before the big gas shortage with cars filling up on odd or even days, depending on their license plate numbers. Immediately afterward, sugar, coffee and chocolate cartels raised their prices, and those commodities were being hoarded all over the country. At this time, I was buying a loaf of hot bread, right out of the oven, at my Albertsons supermarket for 25¢. Alarmists were predicting that someday gas would be a dollar a gallon and bread would be a dollar a loaf. The fools.
My monthly check was $315.00 - before taxes. I shared a 2-bedroon, furnished apartment with another guy. We split the $155.00-a-month rent.
THIS IS NOT MEANT TO BE POLITICAL - Just a little note of perspective about toy prices. And kind of a sobering note about older collectible mark-ups. (I have a Clinton Plastics Glenn Strange Halloween Bucket with an original stamped-on price of 59¢.)
Yumm, "quarter pounder with cheese", my favorite!
I'd only been driving for a year or two before the oil embargo of
the early 1970s and well remember waiting in long lines for fuel.
It can't be long now before the price-per-gallon edges over $6.
With all the desperation in society, it may be time to invest in
a locking gas cap.
As to monster collectibles, the only ones I ever coveted were
custom masks, always prohibitively expensive even in the '60s.
Thankfully there are relatively few mask enthusiasts (as their
forum here attests) which means less speculators driving up
prices.
In the early '70's locking gas caps became a very wise purchase.
Gas was being stolen all over town.
I remember buying a locking gas cap for my car back then. My 2022 doesn't even have a cap on it now.
The Canadian dimes I might have had in my pocket when I was a kid sixty years ago had a silver content of 0.06 troy ounces. Quarters correspondingly contained 0.15 ounces of silver. To gauge changes in "real" prices since my formative years, I therefore always resort to comparing the price of items then versus now in terms of how much they cost in silver. For example, in 1963 for one dime, i.e. 0.06 troy ounces of silver, I could buy any of two packs of hockey cards, a two scoop ice cream cone, a chocolate bar, a bag of chips big enough to contain a CFL or Warship coin free inside, or a ten ounce bottle of pop including a two cent deposit on the bottle (which I'd swiftly turn in for a couple of Bazooka briquettes or large gumballs). So I compare these items to whatever I can buy these days for whatever 0.06 troy ounces is worth which at today's silver price of Cdn.$31.12 works out to Cdn.$1.87.
Similarly one U.S. dime had a silver content of 0.072336 troy ounces of silver in 1963:
(https://www.usacoinbook.com/us-coins/1963-roosevelt-dime.jpg)
At this moment's silver price of U.S.$23.30 one dime sixty years ago is equivalent to U.S.$1.69.
Since everyone used silver as currency sixty years ago, such comparisons are so natural that they're automatic.
Another advantage to doing the calculations in terms of the price of silver is that one is therefore not relying on the government's official inflation numbers which are based on some subjective basket of goods which is unlikely to closely reflect one's own buying habits/preferences. That plus the fact that there are very good grounds to suspect that the government is cooking(underestimating) the official inflation numbers anyway.
:-\