I was born on December 20th 1927, on 103rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan and except for a very brief move to Astoria, around age six, I have lived and worked in Manhattan all my life. However, this story is not about my life but about inflation – what things cost then and what they cost now and a very new phenomena, a kind of explosive crazy pricing where things bear absolutely no relation to what they cost to manufacture or sell. I have been searching for a word for this but I have yet to do so (maybe one will emerge as I write the article).
When my German mother started to send me to the store to buy things I was, who knows, maybe 9 or 10 years of age. That was the years 1936-37 – the very depths of the Great Depression – and like all kids, I memorized the prices and I can tell what a one lb. loaf of Wonder bread cost in 1936, but I can’t tell you what it costs today.
Wonder bread was then 11 cents, but they could not sell it (too expensive) and so they came up with an 8 oz. loaf which sold for 8 cents. A quart of milk was 11 cents and it was costing the farmers more to produce the milk then they were receiving, so in protest, they spilled the milk into the road for a picture on the front page of the Daily News.
We had no supermarkets then – at least not here in the city – and when I went to the small A and P on Hamilton Place, it was like the old fashion grocery store you see in 19th century illustrations – a worn wooden counter with the clerk in a white apron behind it and he got what you wanted. Butter was in a wooden tube and the clerk would lift the glass door of the cooler and cut chunks into a piece of wax paper and weigh it.
When my mother wanted to make some whipped cream to put on top of the dinner cake, she handed me a small cream pitcher and I ran across the street to the Greek deli and Gus would dip a ladle into a metal tank, pour it into the pitcher, and a affix a square of wax paper over the top with a rubber band – all for 10 cents (my mother would save the rubber bands although they were so small and thin she could never find a use for them – she just saved them).
I would go with my mother to the German bakery on Amsterdam Avenue for hot crusty seeded rye bread for 25 cents and a pound of crumbs from the very new bread slicer was 5 cents and a bagel was a nickel. Potatoes were five cents a pound and a big fat new pickles from the barrels were five cents.
The subway was a nickel but you had to pay another nickel to go from the IRT to the BMT or the IND. The turn-style box that took your nickel had a window covered by a fat chipped magnifying lens and your nickel was lit so the booth agent could see if you dropped in a steel washer instead.
Cigarettes had a lead foil wrapper to preserve moisture and kids would pick these up from the street and fold them into a ball and bring them to the scrap dealer for a few pennies.
Under the viaduct that connects Riverside Drive at 125th Street to 135th Street there were cardboard shanties that homeless men lived in and I as a kid accepted this as normal (if you had no money you lived on the streets).
The big treat was Woolworths five and dime on 145th Street and Broadway when after shopping, as we left, there was a marble counter between the door with a giant barrel of Heir’s Root Beer in a beer mug for five cents and long skinny hot dog with mustard sauerkraut and relish for ten cents.
I went to school at PS 192 which occupied classrooms in the huge sprawling Victorian Hebrew Orphan Asylum between 136th and 138thand Broadway and Amsterdam and on the Broadway corner was a White Tower. For lunch, I would buy two nickel hamburgers and a five cent hot chocolate (water no milk) and I would have ten cents left over for a nickel ice cream cone (if you were broke you could get a one scoop cone for three cents).
Six once Coke was king until 12 once Pepsi Cola came out with the jingle “Pepsi Cola is the drink for you, trickle, trickle, trickle and twice as much for a nickel too.”
This brings me to the Penny Candy Store and that is what they cost – for a penny, trays and trays of candy, little Hershey bars, nut clusters, long black and red liquorice sticks, sugared jelly gum tarts (you never saw a penny left on the street as you do now).
My first job at 12 was putting books up in the library for minimum wage 50 cents an hour, but nobody explained the Dewey decimal system to me and I got fired.
The Automat was big and they were all over. When you came in there was a cashier who spewed forth nickels with robot precession; everything was counted in nickels. A large cod fish cake with tomato sauce was two nickels, mashed sweet potatoes with brown sugar, creamed spinach, a cup of coffee with cream, all one nickel, and coconut custard pie at two nickels.
In history books written in and about the Depression, I read that the government tried and tried to start inflation and that a little inflation was a good thing and that was the way economies worked. However, I don’t understand what we have now.
It is not normal inflation or even accelerated inflation but totally nuts inflation. Let me give you a few examples. A vegetable peeler was a quarter and I just checked out Rite aid and the same peeler is $3.49, but here is the killer…
In my day, we only had Griffin shoe polish at 10 cents a can – Kiwi from Australia. Wow! Nothing ever came from Australia so we allowed ourselves to pay 25 cents for this bit of exotica (maybe for that price it was better; anyway it had to come a long way and that costs something).
I have in our scruffy shoe polish box an ancient can of black Kiwi, 2 ½ ounces and it has a price tag $2.99 and it is made in the USA. Now, I have in this same shoebox, a tiny brown Kiwi can at 1 1/8 ounce for $5.99. Earlier, I walked down to Rite-Aid and priced the same 1 1/8 can for $6.49.
Yes, well, what has happened here? Johnson and Johnson now makes Kiwi (I guess they bought them out) and Griffin polish seems to have disappeared altogether. So, it makes no sense comparing Depression prices of 70 years ago to prices today. However, in just the few years or months since I bought my cans of Kiwi, the price has gone up $1.50 for 1 and 1/8 ounces to $6.49.
The same thing is happening with executive salaries. If you are the paid boss of a company and you answer to other paid bosses on the board, you all agree to pay yourselves as much as you can (who’s to check and who’s to complain).
The average executive salary in 2013 was $13.9 million up 9 % from the year before, just like the shoe polish.
Oh, oh, I’ve found the word to describe this – greed.
