I realized long ago that the real standard of living for working people peaked around 1970 or shortly after. Some of my reasons for believing that are as follows.
One fast food lunch for two now costs in nominal terms more than what would have bought a week’s worth of groceries for a family of six in the fifties. One month of my electric bill is equal to about three years of my parents’ electric bill in the fifties. The SALES TAX on many things is now equal to or greater in nominal terms than the item PLUS sales tax cost in the fifties. If I had just my current social security income and 1950 prices my wife and I could buy a NEW Ford sedan every two months, BURN the two month old one and still have plenty of money to live very well. No I am not drunk, I am cold sober. One year of that social security income is equal to what would have bought a nice farm with a fine house, outbuildings, some livestock and equipment in South Carolina in the fifties. A new top of the line Jeep Wrangler now costs what used to be the projected lifetime earnings of a high school graduate when my father was young. A watermelon in the grocery store costs ten times what it did then if not more and is from one tenth to one fourth the size of what one used to be. Today’s watermelon costs well over what I spent for a huge seafood platter for TWO in a restaurant in the late SIXTIES. I am speaking of a platter the likes of which I could not possibly eat in two sittings now. That price also included all the iced tea you could drink and the sales tax was THREE per cent.
I can go on and on but I am about to scream just thinking about it.
Obviously inflation is too low, at least that is what your government wants you to believe.
Your examples are sobering. The one I always use, silly as it might be, is a comic book. When I was a kid in the 1970s, they were 25 cents. I watched the cover prices tick upwards as I got older...$1.00 in the 1990s was a benchmark, and by the time I left them behind some years back they were nearing $3. From what I understand now they range between $3 and $4.
What has changed? It is still fifteen or sixteen pieces of paper stapled together. There is no added value. The real answer is a devaluation of the currency used to buy it...by over 90%.
The only reason this really doesn’t hurt a lot of people is the government printing press, which is charging EBT cards and funding unemployment and disability checks. When that music stops, Katy bar the door.
I wish I had been born about twenty years earlier.
In 1982 we bought our first home, a mobile home. Paid $14k for it. My cars cost at least double that now. I hear you.