Grocery store receipt from 1997 reveals just how cheap American life used to be: ‘Makes me sick to my stomach’

A grocery store receipt from 1997 shows just how much prices of everyday items have skyrocketed in less than three decades.

TikTok user Zoe Dippel shared the shockingly low costs in a viral video after a family member found the proof of purchase in a box of mementos.

“$155 for all of this!” one of Dippel’s relatives remarked after holding up the lengthy receipt from Texas chain H-E-B dated June 20, 1997.

“That’s a lot of stuff,” Dipple declared, as she started to sort through the 122 items and read the prices out loud.

The receipt revealed that Little Debbie brownies cost $1.09, Dannon yogurt was just 50 cents, and a loaf of bread was rung up for $1.26.

Meanwhile, Gerber baby food jars were 55 cents each, while a jumbo pack of Pampers diapers cost $12.99.

The receipt additionally shows that a one-pound carton of strawberries was $1.89. Today at H-E-B, they cost $3.97.

According to the official US Census website, the median household income in 1997 was $37,005. In 2024, that number had risen to $83,730 — a little over double.

In comparison, the cost of many grocery store items has more than tripled, showing that incomes aren’t keeping pace with prices.

Dippel’s video quickly clocked up more than 2 million views, before she shared a second clip in which she tried to purchase the same 122 items online from H-E-B.

My dad told me the general rule of thumb was that the house should not cost more than double your income, and a new car should not lost more than half your income.

That left enough, allegedly, to live on with mortgage and car payments.

This entitled generation thinks they’re the first ones that every struggled financially or had trouble affording a house and it has caused a lot of bitterness and anger against people who had nothing to do with where the young people are today.

Mr. mm and I cut corners and pinched pennies to make ends meet on his income alone. We bought what we could afford and refused to go into debt for anything.

My two daughters are FANTASTIC with money. They know how to save, which includes doing without some of the little things she enjoys but are not essential. My youngest is now learning how to do her own home maintenance from her father to continue to save money. And saving she does, because we know what the costs are for plumbers and electricians.

I’ve seen accountants figure that out, but cannot find the information now.

I stayed home, cooked, did farmer’s markets, canned, sewed, all kinds of things. Saves a lot of money over hiring a babysitter, housekeeper, and eating out or take out. The second income is gone just for that and the kids don’t have a parent home to raise them.

Why should I work my butt off to pay someone else to raise my kids for me while I miss their milestones?

No thanks.

We’ve forgotten the old adage of *The hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world*.

Feminists can go pound sand. I stayed home and was happy to do so.

Assuming average annual inflation since 1977 is 2.45% and using the rule of 72, $1.00 dollar will double in 30 years. So in 2027 the cost of goods will be doubled over the cost in 1997.

Here’s the thing about the inflation rate, it encompasses all average purchases so only comparing a selected bag of groceries which may not reflect the items the average family purchases and also ignoring the other purchases a family makes in addition to groceries makes this exercise in comparison difficult to draw conclusions from except to see first hand how even a 2.45% inflation rate can affect our savings.

This is why someone who is risk adverse and wants to keep money in a bank or buys an annuity is actually taking more risk on running out of money.

My memory is that in in the mid 1960s a McDonald’s Hamburg, french fries and a coke was 35 cents and a candy bar was 5 cents.

I need to have my investment grow at least as fast as inflation and hopefully a little faster.

The rule of thumb I use is that things cost about 2x what they cost in 1992. (Your mileage may vary dependent on the individual item.)

Underlying Cause 1.) Pumping printed currency into the market. The epidemic put this whole process on steroids.

Underlying Cause 2.) Ridiculous deficit spending 95 times out of 100 with no planned remedy, ever. No austerity measures, ever. No rational government spending, ever.

Underlying Cause 3.) Nixon taking us off the gold standard. This allowed printing fiat currency, which just means: Print all you want, forget about the long-term consequences, the way liars like Keynes and every economics teacher and professor taught every student in the United States for the past 75 years.

Underlying Cause 4.) The massive overprinting and deployement of paper currency is designed to cause economic collapse as a part of Cloward-Piven. Cloward-Piven is the gospel of the elite pseudointellectual Communists like Hillary and Obama, whose ultimate goal is the OPPOSITE of sound monetary policy. They want UNSOUND monetary policy leading to collapse.

Underlying Cause 5.) Massive hyperinflation of college tuition (with the help of Communist college administrators) designed to be coupled with federal student loans that generate more printing of money coupled with nothing: No gold, no products made by laborers.

Underlying Cause 6.) The Covid-19 epidemic was an international Communist bioweapon op designed to destroy the Western economy AND cause the US to hyperspend to an exponentially greater degree than even before. Our inflation today is for the most part due to this. The recovery from Covid-19 hyperinflation will easily take 10 years and will probably cause, ultimately a re-indexing of the USD in a 100:1 ratio, as was done in France after years of post-WW2 hyperinflation.

Underlying Cause 7.) Deadly mass-hysterical denial that all this debt is completely imaginary and harmless, even if it becomes astronomical. The fact is, the US is one of a few countries on earth whose GDP/Debt ratio is so great that it is near the point of no return. That early signs of collapse are appearing.

If you want to see a nation that is even closer than us but somehow is clawing its way back to fiscal sanity, see Argentina. They have not been having a good economic time lately, but it is getting better.

The essential motto of the Communists, Democrats, and economists today:

"Public debt is just an abstract construct; it has no meaning. You can just forget about it."

The reality: All debts, whether of your lunch money to the schoolyard bully, or to the water company, the grocery store, the cellphone company, the bank holding your mortgage, OR, public debts like taxes, money owed to foreign governors buying our debt from which our deficits and national debts come, ARE ALL as real as a tree, an ocean, or a falling boulder.

Keynes and all his disciples (they are the near-unanimous majority of economists) are LIARS.

the goal of the Democrat/Communists in the US is the complete COLLAPSE of the US. Having our economy collapse is a BIG part of it. This is why they want to continue super-excessive spending even now when we are nearly at a breaking point from inflation.

All our public debts are real, and all of them increase by interest rates charged by nations who borrow to support our prodigious national debt.

Paying them off (even an initial show of intent to do so would help tremendously at stabilizing our economy and society) is the only way to decrease inflation.

Read, think, grok.

I worked in a grocery store from 1973 to 1991.

In the grocery business, when the economy tanks, people buy more groceries rather than eat out at a restaurant. When the economy improves, people spend more money everywhere, including the grocery store.

During Jimmy Carter, the prices were increasing so much and so often, we had to hire extra help just to keep up with the price increases. This was before the electronic checkout scanners. We had those price label guns. When a price would change, we were supposed to put the new price directly on top of the old price label. It became ridiculous during Carter because the same item could have a stack of price change labels. The bosses eventually told us to scrape the label stacks off, so it did not look so ridiculous.

When the Reagan tax cuts took hold, business skyrocketed.

The top union “journeyman” wage for the grocery workers in 1974 was $2.35/hour.

My furnished studio apartment was $150/month.*

The Community College cost $5 per unit. Three unit course - $15.

I bought a few used cars for $500, and learned to tune them up myself. No computers. Timing, dwell, distributors, points, gaps.

*I recently searched for that same studio apartment. Four hundred square feet. It is now $3,000/month.

If, as seems true, both incomes and prices have gone up since 1997, but prices have gone up much more than incomes, then in a sheer mathematical exercise either of two things has happened, or some combination of those two things, has occurred.

Prices include cost inputs besides wages, so possibly, some portion of the rise in prices was justified regardless of what happened with wages.

On the other hand, if we could do some sort of “net” accounting comparison between households and corporations (cash on hand after all costs have been paid for) we might find for whom that “net” grew more - corporations or individuals. The net personal savings rate has been cut in half since the 1960s and 1970s. That lower savings rate suggests, possibly, a larger share of “net” resources has been shifting away from individuals and towards companies. [One caveat no doubt is that any such “national” figure would be skewed by companies for which that is very much true and drowning out the average net for companies it is not true at all.)

Someone could also argue that we, as a society, seem to more easily award companies whatever prices they demand, but less willingly award pay raises. Then again, our other half is aware that many pay raises are going to come back to us in costs for goods and services we pay for.

Maybe it all seems like a chicken and egg problem.

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