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So maths time...
If that cart is a weeks of groceries, it takes 1250 weeks of groceries to buy a house in 1980.
According to a 2024 USA today article the average family with kids spends $331 per week on groceries.
If the groceries per house ratio stayed the same, a house would be $413,750 in 2024.
The U.S. median home price was $412,000 in September 2023, according to Redfin.
I dunno seems pretty proportionate.
That's not the issue.
Average annual household income in the US in 1980 was $20,020- 42% of a house (average cost of a house in the US in 1980 was actually $47K).
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1982/demo/p60-132.html
Average annual household income in the US in 2022 was $74,580- or 18% of a $412K house.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-279.html
And "household income" definition also changed: at the time the most common was that only the man of the household was working. So I'd say we are down to a quarter of what was earned then.
Damn. That’s some depressing perspective right there.
I think the most important context is minimum wage.
In 1982 a full-time job making $3.35 an hour is pulling in approx $6,700 a year. Or 14% of the price of a house.
In 2022, that same worker, working the same number of hours at minimum wage $7.25 an hour is bringing in $14,500 a year. Or 3.5% the price of a house.
The same for groceries. THAT is the fucked up part. It's what happens when people seem OK with 50 trillion dollars going from the bottom 90% to the top 1% over the past several decades.
I mean, that minimum wage should be higher though.
At the same time, if you doubled it, it would still be half as much of a percentage of a house.
No matter which way we slice this up, were fuckkkkkkked
Yeah minimum wage should be quadrupled at the least. But I think the US should have a 50 dollar minimum wage.
Income. Everything else can be proportional, but if income isn't, we're fucked.
I agree the inflation would not be a huge deal but only if incomes had kept up. Couples are struggling to exist today doing two jobs (or more) each of which could have supported a small family just decades ago.
Furthermore:
So the real question is how did pay in the most common industries keep up with inflation. I don’t think anyone is disputing costs rising at comparable rates. It’s our ability to keep up as earners.
They also did it on a single income back then.
Combining your comment with this sibling reply, you could say that individual income didn't drop by 1/2 relative to the cost of a house; it dropped by 3/4.
The ratio of interest isn't groceries:housing, it's income:CoL
The first ratio may have stayed rather consistent, but the second has not.
So now please do the comparison to income, based on what you think these people bring home.
Inflation vs income
Income hasn't kept up with inflation, so you have a widening gap
The prices may be proportional, but the average "purchasing power" has decreased. Most family units have more than a single income now, but they still struggle.
Inflation goes up (which devalues our income), but our wages have gone up much slower... so we have a widening gap of "purchasing power" that people's budget can feel
The "prices" may be proportional, but the ability to afford them is certainly not
Anybody else find it funny that her cart is just full of junk? No fresh fruit or vegetables to be seen. Some things never change in America.
Therenwas a time in the mid century where these things would be seen as great innovations. All the nutricional (i.e. Calories) without the hassle. Vitamins were discovered during the first half of the 20th century and it would take a while for science to conclude that all this processed food was total junk.
The fresh vegetable section is the first aisle in most grocery stores that I can think of. Any fresh fruit or vegetables she got would be at the bottom.
That’s insane. Sure they’re in the first aisle but they’re either sitting in the baby seat or making their way to the top as I’m loading other stuff.
I don’t like my fruit and veg all battered and bruised.
But her husband likes his fruits and veggies the same way he likes his wife...
Looks to be all grains. I see so much pasta.
It wasn't so popular back then, people ate processed food without fear, organic thing became popular more than 20 years later
Not pictured: 8 bottles of wine and two cartons of cigarettes.
Is that place on fire?
nah, just everyone was constantly smoking cigarettes, cigars and pipes. even the kids.
Tbf she had to afford this with her 0$/hr wage
And her countless hours of unpaid labor!
Which oof sure, being a housespouse is often way harder and more responsibility than people would think (even the ones who benefit from it) .. but damn being a housewife in the 50s? You know how much harder it was to cook back then?! Do laundry or vacuum or probably literally any household chore is so much easier and faster than today. Hell, even taking out the trash is easier not having to drag Oscar's heavy ass house to the curb.
Between working her $3 an hour job
At least $3.10 per hour, thank you very much! That's the same as $12.49 now.
Holy crap I was just guessing l didn't think I'd be somewhat accurate.
That’s also the average looking 35 year old from that time period.
This is 1970s, not 80s . Pretty sure a cart full o groceries was way over $20 in the eighties, after a card full of collected grocery chain stamps was saved and turned in. Inflation and all that.
Anyway.. how bout some Suzy Qs, 'Chun King' (is that oriental flavor?), Kraft Mac N Cheese...and Hawaiian punch?
Break out the silver and spic-and-span those no-wax floors; the gobnah's comin ovah to-nite!
Spent $350 on a single cart of groceries today, nearly lost my mind at how bad it's gotten.
I'm so glad we moved past Suzy-Qs.
Millennials look at the 80s like how boomers look at the 50s
1980 was not prosperous times. I remember us using food stamps. My dad was working in a hospital kitchen and stole food from work to feed us. Inflation was crazy, gas went up to about $1.80 (in 1980 dollars) and the Reagan era mass unemployment of 1982 was just around the corner. Jimmy Carter famously told the nation to wear a sweater in winter when people couldn't afford heating.
Our family of four lived in a small two bedroom duplex in 1980.
I do have fond memories from back then, but it had nothing to do with prosperity. It was that I was always over at Grandma's house and Grandma was a god damned saint who walked among us.
Go ahead and downvote and deny the realities of a time you probably weren't even alive.
I get it. We can't buy houses, we can't afford groceries.
Admittedly my parents couldn't afford a house and we often had to skip on groceries too.
But as a kid of the 80s, the thing that gets me is how these memes seem to ignore inflation entirely.
Yes those numbers are lower but so were wages.
And of course we can can talk about real terms wage stagnation, but poverty is timeless and the 80s were an awful and unaffordable time for a lot of people.
But yeah. Sure.
Things are so much more COMPLEX than they used to be - on purpose ofc, b/c people made money from exploiting that increase in complexity.
e.g. American schools used to be tops in the world for things like STEM + others. Now... not so much.
Healthcare too. Now... not so much.
Life expectancy / standard of living, it's all relevant.
And we don't even know: is this a temporary downswing, which will eventually right itself? It doesn't look like it, when up against the forces of globalization, automation, and fascism - it looks rather like now is as good as it is ever going to get, and things like Social Security, Medicare/-aid will just not be available for the people who are currently paying into it. But, back then they did not know how quickly things would get better either, and yet they did so...
On the other hand, decades went by where the gap b/t a living wage vs. what people were paid got ever wider. DECADES of that practice put us into this situation, and it won't take mere days, weeks, months, or even years to get out of it. Robert Reich's Inequality for All (completely free to watch on YouTube etc.) explains the 3 reasons people did not notice it happening back then: as costs went up, (a) additional people went to work (it used to be just one person, then it became two), (b) people worked for longer hours (not just 30-40 hrs/week, but 60+ these days), and (c) people borrowed against the past successes, with e.g. mortgages to put their kids through college and prop up the standard of living that they were accustomed to.
So, yeah, poverty itself was probably far worse back then, whereas hopelessness seems worse today, and it seems not entirely due to media clickbait exploitation of people's fears. But also, things have shifted such that poverty WILL BE worse in the future: e.g. if young people today cannot afford college, and the minimum wage is not a livable one, then not only will they never own a home, but there is a real, actual potential that they will find themselves homeless. As is happening right now all across the country in fact... Maybe that will be turned around, but like... how?
Indeed, the age-old dance, but always, always with a new form (except there is nothing truly new under the sun).