Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for January 06, 2024

And the items they hold are shrinking too!

Stock up on canned goods and dry beans! And don’t forget a manual can opener! Or two.

Sacks were bigger back then.

Remember the more things change the more they stay the same. Once upon a time that $10 sack was just under a third of an ounce of gold, the Minimum Wage was under $1.50, and $25K could buy a mansion.

What you could buy for ten dollars might have been much more. But what you had to work to get paid 10 dollars was much more, too. Instead of calculationg in Dollars you might translate it into hours of work paid to the average worker of it’s time.

The vise just keeps getting tighter.

5 sacks is $50.00 ?

Interesting amalgamation of Janis’ old and new hairstyles. Panel one kinda looks to be the current ’do with the (older) longer length tacked on at the bottom.

2 or 3 items now, is Ten.

She’s a poet and I didn’t know it.

The first 2 panels is my favorite Janis hair! I remember the transition to shorter hair. Jimmy posted maybe 4 different styles where one was chosen.

I remember that budget—get two twenties out of the ATM, one for groceries and the other for expenses. How quaint.

So much plastic. 2-3 items per bag. So many one use plastic bags. So much waste. And now…self checkout to boot.

What’s a sack? We call them bags. Sack is something you do to the quarterback.

You can carry everything in at once with plastic bags. Paper tears and droops (nobody remembers the proper way to pack bags) and requires several trips. PLASTIC RULES! (We fill the bags with trash before chucking them out)

what? not using your own bags at the store shame.. TJ has them for $1 a pop and they last years the real issue Ihere is the waste of all those plastic bags in the landfill to say nothing of the environmental cost of producing…..as everyone has pointed out—- the value of $$ is variable but $ for $ wage v prices, we are mostly better off than our parents in quality and quantity—- now let’s step back and work on saving this fragile planet before it is buried in plastic

When I graduated from high school my father’s take home pay as a union truck driver was $100.00 per week and land grant state college tuition was $200.00 per semester.

I just apply the “Full-sized candy bar” metric: A nickel in 1969, a quarter in 1979,…

This is a site that I use frequently: https://www.blsDOTgov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

You know what is stupid, prices go up in the stores and restaurants and the blame goes to higher fuel prices. Prices go down at the pump, but the prices at said stores and restaurants stay the same or go up even higher. And I don’t want to hear the complaint it is because of the higher minimum wage rate. That may be a minor bump in price. It is nothing more than artificial inflation powered by greed. Intentionally sell or make less product (and worse, smaller portions for same or higher than same product but in its original size or quantity) but increase price and blame it on supply chain or manufacture of product (supplies and manufacturing equipment have not changed or decreased in size, the amount of product made is intentionally capped lower). And because people will pay for product no matter price because people will almost always pay for product because they want the product, then stores and manufacturers make more money. The farmer doesn’t see the benefit. Truckers don’t see the benefit.

This site goes back a little farther: https://www.in2013dollarsDOTcom/

I don’t know why the url has “2013.” Perhaps that is the year that the site first appeared.

However, today the bags are smaller but contents cost much larger…….

I did not know that “been” is pronounced like “Ben”… ☺

How about “Is as true now as it was then”?

Thank a Biden voter.

I usually do groceries once a month. When I got my pension at the end of December, I spent almost $400 on food (for one person) and didn’t get half of what I needed.

How about converting 1970 dollars to 2024 dollars. A big difference. As a high school girl,in 1970 I could get a bottle of pop (soda) a bag of potato chips and a candy bar for $0.50. These days EACH of them is about $2.00 , but the value of the dollar has changed dramatically…for reasons I will not get into (some guys will argue about ANYTHING with you, especially if you are female. SOME guys lol)

Grocery prices are a poor indicator of nationwide economic health. It’s a narrow slice.

Look at the whole economy. Real gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an annual rate of 4.9% in the third quarter of 2023, The unemployment rate is down to 3.7%, Annual inflation is at 3.1% and continues to drop. Average hourly earnings for employees rose by 4.1% in the last year, easily outpacing inflation.

And be honest, many of you are looking for something to complain about. Consider how many of you said the economy was doing poorly because the price of gasoline was high, but now that it’s dropped 36% you no long seem to think that’s important.

Yep. I went to grocery store this morning. 3 bags = $111.00.

Aww. Those plastic bags kind of look like bunnies. Maybe on purpose? They’re multiplying!

Also some supermarkets make you pay to use paper bags,

They live in a part of the country that doesn’t have a plastic bag ban?

As I get older, I get stronger. When I was, say, 20, I couldn’t possibly lift $50 worth of groceries. Now I do it easily.

In 1964 my mother would give me an average of 18 bucks or so and send me with a list to shop for our large Catholic family. The list was always more costly than the money supplied. I learned quickly to get her to prioritize what was first off the list and to calculate the costs of the items I picked up so as to avoid the embarrassment of being poor while ensuring enough left over for one large pickle out of the pickle barrel.

Pickles were a nickel and my facility with math well developed.

Does the sack in front look like a bunny to anyone other than me?

In today’s episode of “Don’t explain the joke!” we are reminded that now: (1) dollars buy less, (2) grocery bags are smaller.

In 2020 mortgage rates were 3%, now they are over 6%. That is 200% inflation on the cost of money.

Is there some reason why people cannot wrap their heads around inflation? Particularly people who came of age in the 70’s?

Yep. Back in the day, a dime bag was $10.

When my wife came home from the market back in the 1980’s, I would estimate how much she’d spent by multiplying the number of paper bags by $5. It was usually not far off from the actual total.

Except most places you cannot get the one-time use plastic bags. That sure seemed like a great idea. Too bad it became so destructive.

What annoyed me the most in pre-COVID days was when the baggers would only put maybe 2 or 3 items in a plastic bag, so that we ended up with having like a dozen plastic carry bags holding what could have been put in far fewer (I suppose this was mostly so that the bagging was done much faster). We’d end up with dozens and dozens of plastic bags at home, put away in the “bag bag”. The cheap plastic bags are now banned in most stores locally (although the stores will use a higher quality plastic bag if you want it, and they will charge you for). We always use our own bags now, and in most of the grocery stores we go to this means that we do the bagging ourselves, either because of self-checkout or something that started with COVID. This does result in more efficient use of bag space, but it’s also a lot slower!

in Biden’s America it is less for more.

It depends on where you shop and what you buy. My weekly grocery budget is $55 and I feed myself a little too well. However, I follow a mostly plant-based diet, avoid most processed foods, and cook from scratch. ALDI is my go-to place to shop for most of my food shopping.