this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
817 points (99.0% liked)
memes
14521 readers
4119 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How 50-80 years ago winning an appliance on TV used to be a big deal, like all the sudden the winner's household gets a massive jump into the space age because the appliances then must have been expensive.
Tell me you haven’t been appliance shopping without telling me you haven’t been appliance shopping. /s
What do you mean back then? Appliances are expensive now.
Relatively speaking? Appliances are cheaper than they were before.
Here's a Sears catalog from 1991. Appliances are at the end, past page 800 or so. Stoves are $400 or $500. Washer is $400, and a dryer is $300.
By official inflation numbers, things are about 2.3x as expensive now as in late 1991.
Median rent, the rent that the average person was paying, was around $450. Median rent today is about $1500, more than 3 times as much.
Today, a stove that looks like one of those things in the 1991 catalog costs about $500, maybe $600. Washing machines cost about the same. That's only a 25-50% increase, when overall prices have increased by 130% and rents have increased by 200% since 1991.
So yeah, when a stove was worth a whole month's rent, it was comparatively a bigger deal than today, when a stove is worth less than half a month's rent.
The same is broadly true of furniture and other home goods, too: prices have gone up slower than inflation, so in theory we could store more stuff in our cramped homes.
And they don't last as long anymore.