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That then-and-now price comparison of “everything” is apples vs oranges.

That $45 bandaid comes with its fair share of costs delivering it, a combination of: emergency transport, urgent/ER admission process, crazy expensive per sq ft facility, nurse, PA/doctor’s time, enumeration of possible causes & consequences, insurance processing, etc. No fair comparing that to a $0.45 bandaid you applied yourself after getting reamed out by your mother for doing something stupid. YET...everyone expects the full-premium-service at DIY cost.

A phone costs somewhere around $100/mo ($40, $160, whatever), times number of tween-and-up family members, and includes instant access to the near-totality of human knowledge. No fair comparing that the wired single-function single-family poor-quality phone that you used in emergencies by walking a mile at night in a blizzard and banging on a stranger’s door to ask to use because your car was in the ditch (golly, where’d that example come from?).

TV can easily exceed $100/mo, displayed on a 55+” HDTV costing >$1000, with 200 channels, pristine clarity, and even a “pause live stream” DVR. No fair comparing that to a grainy SD box receiving 3 channels.

Dinner costs somewhere around $5-10/plate, including on-demand preparation or ready-to-nuke. No fair comparing that to laboriously turning $2 of staple ingredients into a meal feeding four.

Housing costs ... well, let’s say that I was watching the movie _Winter’s_Bone_ about a poor family heating & cooking with a wood stove and making do with used goods, when I was startled upon realizing that the “poor” accommodations portrayed closely approximated my “upper middle class” lifestyle.

And so on.

Our “norm” is a sea of luxuries normalized to a baseline which the well-off of the past would have despaired aspiring to.
Advertising has convinced us we “need” all this, and prosperity has made it easy to get it with little effort. Now people are bitching that they can’t afford a luxurious lifestyle, and are entitled to the surplus of others to achieve it just because they breathe.