If I had to bet, I’d say someone had a conversation with this professor about value and inflation and somewhere along the line everything got reversed. Something like “Our dollar today is only worth 5 cents compared to 1913.” Which I think is more or less true. But somehow that got translated into “$100 value from 1913 wouldn’t buy a cup of coffee today.” Absolutely backwards.
I figured it was something like that.
I think a cup of coffee cost something like a nickel before WWI which means that $100 could buy maybe $2,000 cups of coffee?
But nevertheless even at today’s prices you can still get maybe 50 cups of coffee for $100 so she’s still full of it.