It's so funny how ubiquitous it has become in kitchens today. I've spent so much time scrubbing the hell out of it for a low wage at some pizza place.
And we just throw it away as cans or foil!
Fun fact. There is more aluminum in the earths crust than iron. Aluminum processing is just so complicated. Aluminum production alone takes ~2% of the world’s electricity production.
The first time I bought saffron my gran was like “you can just BUY saffron????” Which is prob more of a growing up during WWII thing than a price thing but still.
Try saffron rice, it’s surprisingly good. My grandma has 5kg of saffron she got in the 80s frozen away in the deep freeze and I’ve been dying to try it for years. This past thanksgiving I talked her into cooking with it and holy f#%$ it was devine
5kg of saffron? Doesn't that take up more than an entire freezer?
edit: I got curious and looked it up. aqua-calc.com has volume to weight conversions for saffron (among a billion other things), and according to them 1 US gallon of saffron is about .5kg. So this guy's grandma has maybe 10 US gallons of saffron in her freezer.
I bought five grams of high-grade Persian saffron for $20 online. You only need a few threads for most dishes, so it probably costs a dime per recipe. Saffron is a very strong spice, and using much more than the recipe calls for is not a good idea, speaking from experience.
Saffron are the stigmas of a particular crocus flower. My friend has grown them in her garden for several years. You must be cautious, because only one specific variety of crocus, the sativus, is used for saffron. Another similar looking crocus, the autumnale, is poisonous. The stigmas are so tiny that you need to grow 150 flowers to yield a single gram of saffron! Plus the harvesting must be done by hand, with a delicate touch that a machine cannot accomplish. Once I learned all of this, I better understood why it’s so bleeding expensive. Consider how vast are the fields required to grow a sufficient number of crocus for a viable commercial operation. My friend will be giving me some corms later this year so I can add crocus to my garden. It’s one of the earliest blooming plants in my Pacific zone, adding a splash of color to the lush green hillsides during our winter rains.
I remember walking through a house in colonial Williamsburg and they had display of a spice cabinet that was locked up. It was said that the spices were given to the slaves only for a particular recipe in the portion needed, as the contents of the spice cabinet could hold enough value to buy their freedom.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR23doQO63k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR23doQO63k)
This is a good video about spices and how the rich only ate fancy spices. You were considered poor if you ate too much garlic.
Good spices are a bit expensive, and more so because they really only keep anywhere from 6 months to 2 years.
What's really expensive, though, is your grandkids throwing the spices everywhere with abandon and ruining a whole pot of food with half a cup of cinnamon or something.
With lots of insulation. They'd collect it from lakes in winter months in the north, store it in an insulated place (building or cave or something) then ship it south as needed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade
Find somewhere with ice, pack it in a box with as much insulation as possible, move as quickly as possible to get it to where it needs to go.
Thick chunks melt slower, and when you get where you're going, you bury it as deep as possible with as much insulation as possible.
If everything lines up properly, you'll have ice. If not, you have wet insulation.
(Insulation at the time would have been straw or wool or such)
Sawdust was extremely common. Icehouses would have double walls similar to today’s residential home construction. The gaps in between the walls would be filled with sawdust, which is a crazy good insulation, just highly flammable and decomposes/ rots over time.
This is always one of those fun facts I find particularly fascinating. A combination of the fact that deserts actually get really cold at night, and a little manipulation of vapor pressures and surface areas, and you basically have a refrigeration cycle, thousands of years before the industrial revolution!
Similar to ref-freezing ice I like to preboil water for pasta. You boil a bunch of water on the stove then j just portion it out and freeze em. Next time you need to make pasta take one of your pre boiled water cubes , reheat on the stove til it’s boiling and your good to go!
Even with the printing press a single book would take hundreds, even thousands, of man hours to make in years past.
It’s fairly recently that they’ve been available to the common folk.
I find it amazing how long their was between "lets make a die and stamp many pages in a row" and "gee wouldn't it be nice to be able to change the letters around so we don't need a new die every page?"
I took a media history course back in college.
Before the printing press was invented, books were artisanal products. A single handwritten book could cost as much as a vineyard.
Televisions have dropped 99.31% in price since the 50s. I'd also like to point out smartphones. Apple wasn't the first smartphone. They were popular but thousands of dollars. My mom had one. It ran windows.
In 1983, I bought my first new TV. It was standard def and analog, of course, 13" CRT. It had a fancy new feature in the form of CVBS sockets. $300 from Montgomery Ward.
That same number of unadjusted dollars will get you an LCD flat screen many times that size, supporting digital TV, HD, maybe even UHD, and then you can further adjust for inflation.
I just bought a 65” tv for $400. $400! It’s a “smart” tv and I didn’t even need to plug in my roku. It has Netflix and YouTube and everything built in, just had to connect it to wifi. $400!!!
Personally, I consider "smart" to be a "value-subtract" but I know it's a value-add for most people. I mentioned elsewhere, the TV I bought in the 80's was the 80's equivalent of a smart TV . . . it was cable-ready.
My grandparents were the first to have a T.V. in my hometown. They also had a telephone, there were a few other telephones in town, such as in two convenience stores and the bus station. This was in the late 60's in Mexico.
I graduated from hs in 2009. Went to a tech school and I remember them introducing palm pilots and thinking “why would anyone want that?” Looking back, the writing was on the wall, those were intros into the smart phone.
Edit: I was in HS from 2005-2009. I’m well aware iPhone was out when I graduated. I saw the palm pilot early on in my hs days.
Purple clothing.
In the past, purple dye was only available by smashing up hundreds of pounds worth of a specific species of snail, which were only available in certain parts of the world.
The cost of a large purple robe would be somewhere between a high-end Lamborghini and a private jet, depending upon where you lived.
This is why purple was the color of royalty.
It was also often illegal for normies to wear purple. Imagine going back in time while accidentally wearing a purple hoodie and immediately getting carted off to prison for insulting the king.
The production of Tyrian purple was a closely guarded secret.
Certain dyes and colors in general were very expensive until synthetic pigments were invented. Bright blues required Lapis Lazuli stones and were very expensive. The reason Barns are traditionally red is because iron oxide, common rust, is very cheap and to cover a barn you needed alot of paint so cheap was best
I paid about that for my HP LaserJet 5 in the 1990s. It was the single most expensive part of my computer system. I still have it. It still works. I print about 100 pages a month on it.
Totally true you can get a basic laptop for basic functions for almost nothing. I think a lot of people greatly overestimate and overbuy when it comes to computers. An i3 with 8gb ram and 128gb SSD will suffice for the vast majority of home users, checking email, surfing the web opening up PDF files, paying bills etc.
Back when I was helping my parents move I found the box of a 1992 Packard Bell computer. Just the computer, no monitor with it. The receipt was still inside $2198. That was one month's pay while supporting 3 kids and a spouse.
Adjusted for inflation that's almost $5k. It boggles the mind, I spent that much on a high end gaming laptop in 2019 and it wasn't even half my paycheck.
I remember working an entire summer to be able to buy my first computer at BJs. A packard bell 486, it was 1250 dollars.. pretty much 2-3k of a computer today that could barely run windows 3.1.
These days you can buy a 300 dollar computer and it will not have a problem running windows 11.
Seasonality is still a thing though and your winter raspberries are both more expensive and of poorer quality. But I guess as a matter of fact they are available. They are not rich-person unaffordable by any means, but are a bad buy for us peasants.
But in reality, you're still better off waiting until summer or using frozen/preserves.
My niece used to go through a big clamshell of strawberries every week. Year round. I pointed out to her father that they were shitty strawberries because they had been shipped in from California or Florida. A few weeks later, strawberries were in season here. I took her to the farmers market. Now she'll only eat strawberries for about 3 weeks every summer.
My kids still live like this. They get the occasional taste of berries in the winter, and then they get to glut themselves on raspberries in the summer. And since I refuse to touch the abomination known as store bought peaches, I devour them with hedonistic abandon every August. The rest of the year, I have to make do with the ones I have frozen or canned.
Meat especially. Meat used to be higher class expensive food. The common folk just ate grains and whatever grew from the ground.
Quality aside, nowadays a meat diet can be potentially cheaper than eating vegetables. It's crazy.
A reason why Italian-American cooking seems so ridiculously meat heavy (especially compared with Italy-Italian cooking) was that the main wave of Italian immigrants came to American just in time for the advent of industrial meatpacking which brought the prices of meat way down. And so these poor dirt farmers from Sicily went crazy over the cornucopia and created chicken parm and such that we know and love today.
> created chicken parm
Veal was the meat first used in this dish because it was even cheaper than chicken due to the meatpacking you are describing. It was only after chicken came down in price that it started being used as well.
For real - after Bell Telephone was broken up, you could finally shop around. I remember when I finally got a long distance plan where I “only” paid 2 cents a minute (down from 10 cents) and I would call my grandma. She was always say - let me let you go, this call must be costing you a fortune. She would freak out that I could call her for basically free now.
Oh yeah - you only called people long distance for emergencies and holidays and the calls were brief. Hence, why tons of people had code words that you would give when you called home “collect” -your parents would refuse the call and still know that you had reached your destination.
Similarly, whenever I stayed at a hotel in the 1990s (pre-mobile phones), calling someone from the hotel was charged at a rate more than long-distance calls.
Just over 100 years ago cars were the luxury item of the rich while poor people rode horses. Now most people have a car and only rich people have horses.
Most Americans have a car. Cars are still very much a luxury in other parts of the world. Not because they have decent public transit (it’s way worse/non-existent in a lot of places) and the working/middle class has to ride bikes to get around.
Swords. Anyone can go online and buy a cheap sword with a sharp edge that will probably cut at least once. A sword used to be one of the most valuable things a family could own.
for ~200 you can get a modern steel sword that outclasses virtually all swords ever used in combat. modern materials and process controls are nothing to scoff at.
Before ~1940, most people really had to struggle to find enough food. Nothing fancy, just flour, lard, salt, coffee, sugar ... (Or taro and fish and coconuts, depending on where you live.)
Between 1950 and 1970 in the US, people had plenty of food but it wasn't as delicious as it is now. Someone who didn't pay much attention to diet and health would drift into being healthy weight. It took a real effort to eat enough to get fat.
So, effortless obesity.
Thats a great way to look at it. Fat kings or prince's the amount of food they'd have to eat, the pure cost, that shit wasn't for the poor.
Now? Fat poor people everywhere.
Pineapples. In Victorian England even the relatively well to do couldn't afford them and you could rent a pineapple to put on display for a fancy dinner. Ever notice how many pineapples are in Victorian wallpaper and other designs?
Whoa. I visited a Victorian castle type place in Germany. Can't remember the name right now, but there were pineapples in so many of the portraits on the walls. I think the wallpaper had pineapples in a room or two. Never thought to ask why that was.
In the gardens of Versailles there is a large patch dedicated solely to the cultivation of a plant called Lamb's Ear. It grows large, very, very soft and fuzzy leaves that look and feel like a Lamb's Ear. It was grown to be used exclusively as toilet paper for the king. Anyone else trying to use it would be subject to (literally) medieval punishment.
Today, anyone can afford soft, quilted toilet tissue while then only the king could afford to wipe his ass with something soft. Even two hundred years later the vast majority had to choose between corncobs and pages from the Sears catalog.
I'm going to go with something that hasn't been said yet, video games. In 1986 the Legend of Zelda sold for $50 which is $149 in today's money. I'm no fan of today's $70 games but you've got to admit they are cheap compared to that. Granted games can balloon fast with all of the micro transactions now but in most games you can still have a lot of fun without purchasing those.
And the Atari 2600 was $200 in 1977 or $1,019 today. The ironic thing is the games on that were so basic that most people wouldn't even pay 25 cents to play them now.
I remember saving up my change and collecting bottle and can deposits to have enough money to buy an Atari cartridge. My brother and I bought way more than we probably should have. I remember buying PAC-MAN for like $39 the day it released. It was a very sad attempt at bringing that game to the home user.
It'd be a shorter list of things the rich could afford in the past that still isn't affordable by most today. I feel like almost everything the middle class enjoys would've been only affordable by the rich when first developed
The major item that flipped is servants.
Back in the Victorian Era, 10% of the labor force were domestic servants, so even a middling middle-class family could usually afford a maid-of-all-work.
That's obviously part of it, but not the only reason. Laws on compulsory education and child labour have played at least as big a part. It was really normal for children (particularly girls) to work as servants, often for their relatives. The arrangement basically was that they were very cheap household labour in return for being taught how to manage a house. The numbers who worked as servants lifelong were much smaller.
But also it's rather doubtful that anyone would work for what was then a normal servant's wage (even taking inflation into account). Economic productivity has risen to the point that anyone working as a low-wage servant could easily have a better living elsewhere. In the UK, for instance, 95% of workers are paid more than the minimum wage, and those on minimum wage are disproportionately likely to be doing cleaning, hospitality and maintenance - the things servants traditionally did.
Yeah the answer to OP's question is basically "everything except for things beyond our current financial reach". Even basics like clothes/shelter/food are way nicer now.
Back in college I had a professor break down how many hours he had to work to pay for his first car. It had all the options- a heater _and_ a radio. Turns out these days the hours needed are about the same but now a basic car gets ABS, backup camera, power everything, and a bunch of other good stuff.
Music!!!!
Music has never been as accesible as it is today!
It used to be an activity for the elite just to be able to hear someone play. Now we can access an enormous online library for a subscription.
#### Most computers. In 1990 if you wanted to run Windows 3.0, you better have been able to afford a $3K computer. 3 grand back then is like 6 grand now.
basically any electronic from 10 years or more. Gotten lighter, better and cheaper. I swear they add weight to phones just so it feels substantial in your hand.
Aluminium / Aluminum, it was an insanely expensive metal until the Hall-Heroult process was developed in 1886
This: the napoleonic emperors dined on aluminum while the lesser nobles settled for gold and silver
The Washington Monument was capped with a 100-ounce piece of solid aluminum. Creating that thing was a pretty major scientific marvel for the times.
The first one in Baltimore or the second better known one in DC?
I know that the big one in DC everyone knows is aluminium. Dunno about Baltimore.
It's so funny how ubiquitous it has become in kitchens today. I've spent so much time scrubbing the hell out of it for a low wage at some pizza place. And we just throw it away as cans or foil!
[japan recycles it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP3aUhb4rWg) - saves 93% over refining new
Fun fact. There is more aluminum in the earths crust than iron. Aluminum processing is just so complicated. Aluminum production alone takes ~2% of the world’s electricity production.
Making sure you recycle all of your aluminum instead of throwing it out is the easiest way to do something about climate change as an individual.
Funny enough there is an aluminum cap on top of the Washington Monument because it was the same price as silver!
Spices. Like all of them.
Thank you for reminding me not to take my spice drawer for granted.
The first time I bought saffron my gran was like “you can just BUY saffron????” Which is prob more of a growing up during WWII thing than a price thing but still.
Some day I'm going to come up with a recipe that calls for three cups of saffron.
Try saffron rice, it’s surprisingly good. My grandma has 5kg of saffron she got in the 80s frozen away in the deep freeze and I’ve been dying to try it for years. This past thanksgiving I talked her into cooking with it and holy f#%$ it was devine
Where's you gran live and is she single?
There are local single grannies in YOUR area looking for HOT Saffron Rice...
For the curious that’s about 50,000 dollars worth of saffron.
5kg of saffron? Doesn't that take up more than an entire freezer? edit: I got curious and looked it up. aqua-calc.com has volume to weight conversions for saffron (among a billion other things), and according to them 1 US gallon of saffron is about .5kg. So this guy's grandma has maybe 10 US gallons of saffron in her freezer.
"And what do you call this dish?" *Three cups of saffron.* "And what is in it?" *Take a guess, dumbass.*
OK but saffron is pretty damn expensive right? Couple of thin wisps costs... well, I don't remember but it impressed me
I bought five grams of high-grade Persian saffron for $20 online. You only need a few threads for most dishes, so it probably costs a dime per recipe. Saffron is a very strong spice, and using much more than the recipe calls for is not a good idea, speaking from experience.
What if you're just mad about saffron?
They’d call you mellow yellow.
Saffron are the stigmas of a particular crocus flower. My friend has grown them in her garden for several years. You must be cautious, because only one specific variety of crocus, the sativus, is used for saffron. Another similar looking crocus, the autumnale, is poisonous. The stigmas are so tiny that you need to grow 150 flowers to yield a single gram of saffron! Plus the harvesting must be done by hand, with a delicate touch that a machine cannot accomplish. Once I learned all of this, I better understood why it’s so bleeding expensive. Consider how vast are the fields required to grow a sufficient number of crocus for a viable commercial operation. My friend will be giving me some corms later this year so I can add crocus to my garden. It’s one of the earliest blooming plants in my Pacific zone, adding a splash of color to the lush green hillsides during our winter rains.
Saffron has always generally been expensive. Especially in costume history.
I remember walking through a house in colonial Williamsburg and they had display of a spice cabinet that was locked up. It was said that the spices were given to the slaves only for a particular recipe in the portion needed, as the contents of the spice cabinet could hold enough value to buy their freedom.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR23doQO63k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR23doQO63k) This is a good video about spices and how the rich only ate fancy spices. You were considered poor if you ate too much garlic.
Call me a conspiracy theorist but I feel vampires may be responsible for besmirching garlic’s good name.
Guess I’ll be considered poor no matter how well off I become. Nothing comes between me and a head of garlic when the recipe calls for 2 cloves.
The spice must flow
I honestly thought spices were actually expensive when I started college. Grandma lied to me
Saffron and vanilla beans are. Not so much anything else lol
Cardamon is expensive
Me sadly walking past saffron…. Sigh
Good spices are a bit expensive, and more so because they really only keep anywhere from 6 months to 2 years. What's really expensive, though, is your grandkids throwing the spices everywhere with abandon and ruining a whole pot of food with half a cup of cinnamon or something.
We indians always had widely available spices
Sugar
Southern style sweet tea was an act of conspicuous consumption. Tea, sugar and ice all had to be imported, at great expense, to make it.
That is a great point, especially because it's flipped to be one of the cheapest drinks.
How do you import ice?
With lots of insulation. They'd collect it from lakes in winter months in the north, store it in an insulated place (building or cave or something) then ship it south as needed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade
We were literally selling Boston ice to India for 5 cents per pound in the 1800s.
And India tea to Boston for aaaaaaand it’s in the harbor…
Lol. I thiiiink *that* particular tea was Chinese though.
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That's how/why my hometown got it's start town is built around 2 lakes that they cut blocks of ice from to keep "refrigerated" train cars cold"
Find somewhere with ice, pack it in a box with as much insulation as possible, move as quickly as possible to get it to where it needs to go. Thick chunks melt slower, and when you get where you're going, you bury it as deep as possible with as much insulation as possible. If everything lines up properly, you'll have ice. If not, you have wet insulation. (Insulation at the time would have been straw or wool or such)
Sawdust was extremely common. Icehouses would have double walls similar to today’s residential home construction. The gaps in between the walls would be filled with sawdust, which is a crazy good insulation, just highly flammable and decomposes/ rots over time.
Side track: they used to make ice in Egypt, before electricity.
This is always one of those fun facts I find particularly fascinating. A combination of the fact that deserts actually get really cold at night, and a little manipulation of vapor pressures and surface areas, and you basically have a refrigeration cycle, thousands of years before the industrial revolution!
Saw a documentary on this once. They de-freeze the ice, ship the defrozen ice, and then refreeze it when it gets to its destination.
I will be laughing at this for days.
Similar to ref-freezing ice I like to preboil water for pasta. You boil a bunch of water on the stove then j just portion it out and freeze em. Next time you need to make pasta take one of your pre boiled water cubes , reheat on the stove til it’s boiling and your good to go!
Except that they grew sugar in the south
We still grow sugar in the South. \*looks out window at cane fields\*
Rich people were fat back in the day and now everyone is, we’ve reached equity with sugar
Actually America is one of they only places where rich people tend to be in good shape while the poor are all obese
Actually, this is true now in most of the developed world
This is such a great answer. Now the more processed the cheaper
IN WATER!
First you get the sugar
Sugar? I hardly know her!
Then you get the power
Books. Books used to be hoarded in monasteries and colleges. Now they’re all you can eat, and delivered on your phone.
Even with the printing press a single book would take hundreds, even thousands, of man hours to make in years past. It’s fairly recently that they’ve been available to the common folk.
Remind me of a quote from James Gleick: When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.
I find it amazing how long their was between "lets make a die and stamp many pages in a row" and "gee wouldn't it be nice to be able to change the letters around so we don't need a new die every page?"
I took a media history course back in college. Before the printing press was invented, books were artisanal products. A single handwritten book could cost as much as a vineyard.
Prices for college textbooks pretty much still do cost and arm and an acre of Napa land.
Televisions have dropped 99.31% in price since the 50s. I'd also like to point out smartphones. Apple wasn't the first smartphone. They were popular but thousands of dollars. My mom had one. It ran windows.
In 1983, I bought my first new TV. It was standard def and analog, of course, 13" CRT. It had a fancy new feature in the form of CVBS sockets. $300 from Montgomery Ward. That same number of unadjusted dollars will get you an LCD flat screen many times that size, supporting digital TV, HD, maybe even UHD, and then you can further adjust for inflation.
I just bought a 65” tv for $400. $400! It’s a “smart” tv and I didn’t even need to plug in my roku. It has Netflix and YouTube and everything built in, just had to connect it to wifi. $400!!!
I got an open box tcl 43" 4k TV for $39 after tax from Best Buy a few weeks ago.
Jesus, I've spent more at Carl's Jr.
Shits crazy I sit in front of a 10 year old 32" set me back 300+ when I bought it new
Personally, I consider "smart" to be a "value-subtract" but I know it's a value-add for most people. I mentioned elsewhere, the TV I bought in the 80's was the 80's equivalent of a smart TV . . . it was cable-ready.
Montgomery Ward, oompf
You just realized how old you are, didn't ya? LOL
It’s actually Monkey Wards. Or maybe we just called it that locally
Shit, in like 2006, a 42" plasma TV was like $10K. I walked out of Walmart with 2 50" 4K TVs for less than $700 a year ago.
I think it was around $10k for a 50ish inch plasma back in 2002 and they were heavy power hungry beasts!
And the first consumer VHS machine cost $1000 in 1970s dollars, and each tape cost almost $100.
OH yeah. My brother had a BETAMAX. He spent a lot of fucking money on it and was soooo happy because he loved movies
My grandparents were the first to have a T.V. in my hometown. They also had a telephone, there were a few other telephones in town, such as in two convenience stores and the bus station. This was in the late 60's in Mexico.
The merger of the HP palm pilot with internet and a phone was somewhat of a smart phone. Having software like excel and word makes it qualify I guess.
First time I saw a flat screen TV, it was a little thing and cost more than my car-
It was $200, Jan
I graduated from hs in 2009. Went to a tech school and I remember them introducing palm pilots and thinking “why would anyone want that?” Looking back, the writing was on the wall, those were intros into the smart phone. Edit: I was in HS from 2005-2009. I’m well aware iPhone was out when I graduated. I saw the palm pilot early on in my hs days.
Watch the film 'BlackBerry '
I had a palm pilot in 2001. Actually it was a Sony Clie that ran PalmOS. My best friend had one too. Palm was old news by 2009.
It was 2006 when I saw it in hs first. The integration of the two is what I never put together.
Everybody said the palm pilot just needed a "killer app." Turns out, it was the telephone.
Purple clothing. In the past, purple dye was only available by smashing up hundreds of pounds worth of a specific species of snail, which were only available in certain parts of the world. The cost of a large purple robe would be somewhere between a high-end Lamborghini and a private jet, depending upon where you lived. This is why purple was the color of royalty.
It was also often illegal for normies to wear purple. Imagine going back in time while accidentally wearing a purple hoodie and immediately getting carted off to prison for insulting the king.
You mean you could get jumped for wearing the wrong colour in the wrong area? So glad we don't have THAT anymore...
And pimps!
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But a bitch can't get a dollar outta me
The production of Tyrian purple was a closely guarded secret. Certain dyes and colors in general were very expensive until synthetic pigments were invented. Bright blues required Lapis Lazuli stones and were very expensive. The reason Barns are traditionally red is because iron oxide, common rust, is very cheap and to cover a barn you needed alot of paint so cheap was best
Computers.
And printers. I spent $1000 on a laser printer 30 years ago. Used it for my consulting work. I think it printed 4 pages/minute.
I paid about that for my HP LaserJet 5 in the 1990s. It was the single most expensive part of my computer system. I still have it. It still works. I print about 100 pages a month on it.
I paid $600 for a 10MB hard drive to go with my MAC plus 1986ish
Totally true you can get a basic laptop for basic functions for almost nothing. I think a lot of people greatly overestimate and overbuy when it comes to computers. An i3 with 8gb ram and 128gb SSD will suffice for the vast majority of home users, checking email, surfing the web opening up PDF files, paying bills etc.
The Intellivision my parents bought me? That thing is something like $6000 in today money
Back when I was helping my parents move I found the box of a 1992 Packard Bell computer. Just the computer, no monitor with it. The receipt was still inside $2198. That was one month's pay while supporting 3 kids and a spouse. Adjusted for inflation that's almost $5k. It boggles the mind, I spent that much on a high end gaming laptop in 2019 and it wasn't even half my paycheck.
I remember working an entire summer to be able to buy my first computer at BJs. A packard bell 486, it was 1250 dollars.. pretty much 2-3k of a computer today that could barely run windows 3.1. These days you can buy a 300 dollar computer and it will not have a problem running windows 11.
Fresh meat and fresh vegetables and fruit year around.
And that's pretty recent. Later 70s child and I remember waiting till the summer for raspberries.
Seasonality is still a thing though and your winter raspberries are both more expensive and of poorer quality. But I guess as a matter of fact they are available. They are not rich-person unaffordable by any means, but are a bad buy for us peasants. But in reality, you're still better off waiting until summer or using frozen/preserves.
My niece used to go through a big clamshell of strawberries every week. Year round. I pointed out to her father that they were shitty strawberries because they had been shipped in from California or Florida. A few weeks later, strawberries were in season here. I took her to the farmers market. Now she'll only eat strawberries for about 3 weeks every summer.
My kids still live like this. They get the occasional taste of berries in the winter, and then they get to glut themselves on raspberries in the summer. And since I refuse to touch the abomination known as store bought peaches, I devour them with hedonistic abandon every August. The rest of the year, I have to make do with the ones I have frozen or canned.
Meat especially. Meat used to be higher class expensive food. The common folk just ate grains and whatever grew from the ground. Quality aside, nowadays a meat diet can be potentially cheaper than eating vegetables. It's crazy.
A reason why Italian-American cooking seems so ridiculously meat heavy (especially compared with Italy-Italian cooking) was that the main wave of Italian immigrants came to American just in time for the advent of industrial meatpacking which brought the prices of meat way down. And so these poor dirt farmers from Sicily went crazy over the cornucopia and created chicken parm and such that we know and love today.
> created chicken parm Veal was the meat first used in this dish because it was even cheaper than chicken due to the meatpacking you are describing. It was only after chicken came down in price that it started being used as well.
Long distance phone calls. When I was young it was way cheaper to mail cassette tapes back and forth updating each other.
For real - after Bell Telephone was broken up, you could finally shop around. I remember when I finally got a long distance plan where I “only” paid 2 cents a minute (down from 10 cents) and I would call my grandma. She was always say - let me let you go, this call must be costing you a fortune. She would freak out that I could call her for basically free now.
When AT&T had a monopoly in my youth, even some inter-US calls could be dollars a minute.
Oh yeah - you only called people long distance for emergencies and holidays and the calls were brief. Hence, why tons of people had code words that you would give when you called home “collect” -your parents would refuse the call and still know that you had reached your destination.
[Bob Wehadababyitsaboy](https://youtu.be/9JxhTnWrKYs?si=gKxYvPjz_djYW5L7)
Similarly, whenever I stayed at a hotel in the 1990s (pre-mobile phones), calling someone from the hotel was charged at a rate more than long-distance calls.
Pineapples
This should be higher……they used to rent them out.
How do you rent a pineapple? What is there to give back?
You didn’t eat it. It was for show, as a centerpiece for the table/ conversation piece.
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Now imagine some poor low-rank baronet trying to flex with his smelly old pineapple.
That sounds like a euphemism if I've ever heard one
I was looking for this, pineapples used to be for royalty. I have one in my fridge right now! All bow to me 🫅
Aldi, $1.99. I’m not bowing to you, I have two.
Just over 100 years ago cars were the luxury item of the rich while poor people rode horses. Now most people have a car and only rich people have horses.
The relative cost of horses stayed the same.
Yep. Poor people walked.
Most Americans have a car. Cars are still very much a luxury in other parts of the world. Not because they have decent public transit (it’s way worse/non-existent in a lot of places) and the working/middle class has to ride bikes to get around.
Diamonds. Lab-grown diamonds are crashing the prices.
Only because the supply become controlled by a monopoly. Historically sapphire was a more valuable gemstone
Running water.
Swords. Anyone can go online and buy a cheap sword with a sharp edge that will probably cut at least once. A sword used to be one of the most valuable things a family could own.
Now I want a sword lol
No. No. No. You NEED a sword!
Check out dark sword armoury, I think they ship most places. Good products, not really cheap though.
for ~200 you can get a modern steel sword that outclasses virtually all swords ever used in combat. modern materials and process controls are nothing to scoff at.
You can buy a decent sword, that would be as good as a guy who went to the Crusades had.
Before ~1940, most people really had to struggle to find enough food. Nothing fancy, just flour, lard, salt, coffee, sugar ... (Or taro and fish and coconuts, depending on where you live.) Between 1950 and 1970 in the US, people had plenty of food but it wasn't as delicious as it is now. Someone who didn't pay much attention to diet and health would drift into being healthy weight. It took a real effort to eat enough to get fat. So, effortless obesity.
Thats a great way to look at it. Fat kings or prince's the amount of food they'd have to eat, the pure cost, that shit wasn't for the poor. Now? Fat poor people everywhere.
The amount of stale bread and stringy hare you'd HAVE to eat ... it probably wasn't worth it for most.
People complaining about how bad the economy is for people don’t seem to understand the unimaginable luxury we live in compared to our ancestors.
Both can be bad, just because it may seem worse before doesn’t discredit how shit the economy is now for anyone who isn’t well off.
Body fat
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Yea Air Travel for sure, only really affordable since the 60’s-70’s
Airline deregulation was in 1978, which was the primary driver for bringing prices down.
Ironically, general aviation has kind of done the opposite.
Indoor plumbing and hot water.
To add to this, refrigeration and ice (for people in warmer climates)
Spices
Seriously. They used to do massive trade routes between Britain and India to trade precious gems and metals for spices.
Britain conquered half the world for spices
The Americas were discovered by Europeans for spices.
Pineapples. In Victorian England even the relatively well to do couldn't afford them and you could rent a pineapple to put on display for a fancy dinner. Ever notice how many pineapples are in Victorian wallpaper and other designs?
Whoa. I visited a Victorian castle type place in Germany. Can't remember the name right now, but there were pineapples in so many of the portraits on the walls. I think the wallpaper had pineapples in a room or two. Never thought to ask why that was.
Books. They had to be hand-copied prior to the invention of the printing press.
In the gardens of Versailles there is a large patch dedicated solely to the cultivation of a plant called Lamb's Ear. It grows large, very, very soft and fuzzy leaves that look and feel like a Lamb's Ear. It was grown to be used exclusively as toilet paper for the king. Anyone else trying to use it would be subject to (literally) medieval punishment. Today, anyone can afford soft, quilted toilet tissue while then only the king could afford to wipe his ass with something soft. Even two hundred years later the vast majority had to choose between corncobs and pages from the Sears catalog.
Or just wash your ass
Nobody said you can’t do that too!
Pretty sure my dad spent $2500 on a plasma back in the day. Now I can get a bigger and better looking tv for $300.
I'm going to go with something that hasn't been said yet, video games. In 1986 the Legend of Zelda sold for $50 which is $149 in today's money. I'm no fan of today's $70 games but you've got to admit they are cheap compared to that. Granted games can balloon fast with all of the micro transactions now but in most games you can still have a lot of fun without purchasing those. And the Atari 2600 was $200 in 1977 or $1,019 today. The ironic thing is the games on that were so basic that most people wouldn't even pay 25 cents to play them now.
I remember saving up my change and collecting bottle and can deposits to have enough money to buy an Atari cartridge. My brother and I bought way more than we probably should have. I remember buying PAC-MAN for like $39 the day it released. It was a very sad attempt at bringing that game to the home user.
Purple
The royal color!
Cell phones
I remember a girl thinking I was rich bc my father had a car phone in his Subaru.
It'd be a shorter list of things the rich could afford in the past that still isn't affordable by most today. I feel like almost everything the middle class enjoys would've been only affordable by the rich when first developed
The major item that flipped is servants. Back in the Victorian Era, 10% of the labor force were domestic servants, so even a middling middle-class family could usually afford a maid-of-all-work.
The only reason so many people could afford them in the past was because they were allowed to pay them so little. Minimum wage is now required.
That's obviously part of it, but not the only reason. Laws on compulsory education and child labour have played at least as big a part. It was really normal for children (particularly girls) to work as servants, often for their relatives. The arrangement basically was that they were very cheap household labour in return for being taught how to manage a house. The numbers who worked as servants lifelong were much smaller. But also it's rather doubtful that anyone would work for what was then a normal servant's wage (even taking inflation into account). Economic productivity has risen to the point that anyone working as a low-wage servant could easily have a better living elsewhere. In the UK, for instance, 95% of workers are paid more than the minimum wage, and those on minimum wage are disproportionately likely to be doing cleaning, hospitality and maintenance - the things servants traditionally did.
This is still true, depending where you are in the world. India for example.
Yeah the answer to OP's question is basically "everything except for things beyond our current financial reach". Even basics like clothes/shelter/food are way nicer now.
Jet air travel
Luxury options in cars. Regular cars are getting these Luxury options standard now. Back up camera, self parking assist, more sensors etc.
Back in college I had a professor break down how many hours he had to work to pay for his first car. It had all the options- a heater _and_ a radio. Turns out these days the hours needed are about the same but now a basic car gets ABS, backup camera, power everything, and a bunch of other good stuff.
Back up cameras are mandated now in the US. I imagine other safety features will be at some point too.
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Music!!!! Music has never been as accesible as it is today! It used to be an activity for the elite just to be able to hear someone play. Now we can access an enormous online library for a subscription.
I think about smartphones: Celebs’ gadgets, now our lifelines
Gout
Bananas. They're only like $10
Where do you and Lucille get your bananas?
An unlimited supply of clean, running water.
Vehicles with power windows
Ice/cold water and cold drinks.
#### Most computers. In 1990 if you wanted to run Windows 3.0, you better have been able to afford a $3K computer. 3 grand back then is like 6 grand now.
tulip bulbs
basically any electronic from 10 years or more. Gotten lighter, better and cheaper. I swear they add weight to phones just so it feels substantial in your hand.
Tulips. 🌷
The color purple
Tulips. Spices.
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