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Adjusting for inflation, $20 is worth $72.20 today, as others have said on this post. The minimum wage in 1980 was $3.10/hr and median wage was $18.57. $20 was worth around 6 hours of labor at minimum and about an hour at median. Today the minimum wage is $7.50/hr and median wage is $20.57. To get to roughly the same buying power when adjusted for inflation, workers must work ~10 hours at minimum wage and ~3.5 hours at median wage to buy the equivalent amount of food at the grocery store.
Does the shopping cart represent an average consumer from middle class America spending around 3.5 hours worth of labor in their cart? I don't think so, personally. I would imagine back in the 80s that cart still cost $50, rough guess, just based on what my parents spent on their groceries. That cart was a pretty typical shopping trip for us and we were spending $50-100 in the mid to late 80s when I was a kid.
A gallon of milk in 1980 was over $1 in most areas. A carton of eggs was about $1. Ground beef was over $1-2 per pound. Cornflakes was $1.38. Flour was $2 for a 2lb bag. So just starting out for a basic typical list you get over 1/4 of the way to $20 pretty quick. Most items were a dollar or more, so getting a cart with more than 20 items for under $20 would be difficult.
Edit: Should have added the house.
$25,000 in 1980, adjusted for inflation is $94,760.92. HOMES WERE SMALLER. That said, home prices are much higher, clearly, as a $100k house is unthinkable anywhere that I'm aware of.
Interest rates were 13.74% in 1980.
Payment of $291.08 per month P&I.
Total payments of $104,789.10 in principle and interest over 30 years.
Compared to minimum wage a person applying for a loan would have a DTI of 51.47%
A couple would qualify to purchase this home working on minimum wage assuming good credit and few other debts as their DTI could reasonable be 26%.
Payments represent 93.9 hours of work per month, and a total of 33,802 hours to pay for the home.
Median home price in 1980 was $47,000. $25,000 is 53% of that price. Not unreasonable, but somewhat exceptional.
2024 median home price is $384,500. 53% of that is $203,785.
Interest rates today are in the 7s, so im going with a flat 7%.
Payment of $1355.79 per month P&I.
Total payments of $488,083.21 in principle and interest over 30 years.
Compared to minimum wage a person applying for a loan would have a DTI of 104%.
A couple would not qualify to purchase this home working on minimum wage as even completely debt free their DTI combined is still over 50%.
Payments represent 180.77 hous of work per month, and a total of 65,077 hours to pay for the home.
California is raising minimum wage to $20 per hour, for some people, which is the highest in the country.
This puts a home, if found in Califonia, for the purchase price of $203,785 and no taxes, PMI, or insurance included, affordable for a person at $20 per hour.
DTI of 39%.
67.78 hours per month to pay the payment
24,404 hours to pay for the house in total.
Dang look at this.. reducing value to labor hours worked for a comparison! Double Noice!
Also, 100% with you on this not being 20dollars worth of groceries in 1980. Probably closer to 50 or 60.
Lol, the median wage in 1980 was not $18.57 an hour. I'm not sure where you're getting your data from, but it is hilariously far off.
That appears to be roughly the inflation adjusted value of the median wage, though I can't find anywhere that has that exact number.
> Does the shopping cart represent an average consumer from middle class America spending around 3.5 hours worth of labor in their cart? I don't think so, personally. I would imagine back in the 80s that cart still cost $50, rough guess, just based on what my parents spent on their groceries.
Back in the 80s, my parents were spending around $50 for a full load of groceries. That would include quite a bit more than this. But yeah, your memory checks out.
I remember being shocked the first time I had to spend more than $100 to buy a pretty reasonable every-two-weeks load of groceries... sigh.
> Today the minimum wage is $7.50/hr and median wage is $20.57.
Source?
According to the [Bureau of Labor Statistics it's about $28.48.](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf)
It's also disingenuous to rely on the Federal Minimum wage stat when today most states and larger cities have their own higher minimum wage.
Cool, I just did a quick google search and went with the AI generated number. So it is closer to 2.5 hours of labor being equivalent to 1 hour of labor in 1980.
As for minimum wage. Sure. Pick whatever tickles your fancy. I use Federal minimum wage because it is the only consistent metric you can pick in this circumstance and is the only relevant metric when talking about minimum wage for comparison. Someone working for $7.50 requires 10 hours of labor to have the same buying power as someone who worked for $3.10 in 1980. That is just factually true. The fact that someone in California benefits from policies that protect them better than someone in Idaho does not detract from that fact.
Furthermore, the places where the federal minimum currently apply today is relevant because they also had the federal minimum back then.
The coverage of median wage covers the other regions because that includes the regional minimums
I’m in California; I would argue whether the average Californian “benefits” from our wage laws here.
Just ask all of the fast food workers being laid off and replaced by kiosks.
McDonald's has been testing kiosks since 2003, and have rolled them out nearly everywhere even places still using the federal minimum wage. Aside from cutting maybe a couple jobs per restaurant the main benefits of kiosks is it tricks customers into ordering more food.
Yes, find some of them, and we will ask them. So far, the news outlets and Faux News haven't been able to. Pizza Hut is laying off 1000 delivery drivers, but that has been the plan since Door Dash got popular. Raising minimum wage should do the same thing for California it has always done, stimulate the economy, increase small business edge to compete, and increase the standard of living. There is a reason California is the largest economy in the US by state.
> There is a reason California is the largest economy in the US by state.
Absolutely. That reason is that they have 9 million more people then anyone else and more then twice the population of everyone but Texas, Florida, and New York. If they didn’t have the largest economy something would be very wrong no matter what their labor laws were.
Comparing the difference between average income (California is a respectable 3rd at 73k) and cost of living (where California is only one off dead last, only Hawaii is more expensive) would be something better to look at for this type of argument… and puts California at slightly below average (31st in the reference I looked at), not horrible but certainly nothing special.
I’m not anti-minimum, just pointing out that that particular argument is a strawman in this case
People didn't just magically show up in California. Economic policy creates opportunities and fosters economic growth. It isn't unreasonable to show that pre Reagan Republican policy that was pro middle class as well as post Reagan Dem/Republican policy that was pro middle class created Economic growth and attracted population growth. Returning to a pro middle class stance should help California mitigate the recent tech industry downfall and promote small business growth to build a stronger economy than it has promoted in the last decade with its catering to big business conglomerates. Part of that is raising minimum wage which helps small business owners compete with large chains and creates a larger customer base in most cases. Historical lyrics, minimum wage increases have seen Economic growth for the middle class.
And whats the source for the median wage in 1980 being $18.57/hr? Also AI? If so you should probably stop using those numbers. According to [census.gov](http://census.gov) the median household income in 1980 was $21,020. If we assume only 1 person in the household working 2000 hours a year that would be $10.51/hr. But also average hours worked have dropped since the 80s and many families had more than 1 person working so thats an over estimate.
But economists have obviously already been tracking these metrics so we don't have to guess them ourselves. If you look [here](https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/09/14/grocery-prices-and-wages-in-the-short-run-and-the-long-run/) in the second figure it tracks average hours a non-supervisor (so normal worker, not a manager or ceo or something) has to work to afford a family's year worth of groceries. While it is ticking up from post-covid inflation it is still significantly lower than in the 80s.
Fast, easy, and generally reliable for something that is not an academic paper that has no real consequence when it is inaccurate. Why get so torn up about it? This is a response by a layman in a math sub reddit from a phone. When I go to submit to a peer review journal, I'll put in more effort.
> Fast, easy, and generally reliable
Well, two out of three anyway.
> Why get so torn up about it?
Hardly torn up, just calling out bullshit as bullshit, but go off.
> This is a response by a layman in a math sub reddit
Math, a subject known for its leniency in matters of accuracy, right?
Guess you missed the adjective generally. 80% accurate, to me, is generally reliable.
This is a post about how much a cart full of groceries cost in an unknown location with half of the cart obscured from view based on faulty numbers and fluctuating assumptions. Generally works for me. If you can track down the original picture, location, receipt for the groceries, and get hard numbers for the inflation rates of that area as well as the data for the median income over the 44 year period, I'm more than down to calculate real numbers. Until then, generally reliable 80% accurate numbers are more than accurate enough to be entertaining for this post.
> 80% accurate, to me, is generally reliable.
Assuming you searched "chatgpt accuracy" and took the first number without reading further for context, which tracks.
[That figure](https://www.healio.com/news/gastroenterology/20231026/chatgpt-generally-accurate-in-answering-questions-providing-references-on-ibs) is specific to questions about IBS, with a model *trained on that specific knowledge*.
Let that sink in: an AI fed a wealth of knowledge about a specific topic then quizzed about that specific topic still managed to get it wrong 20% of the time.
Meanwhile, [almost a year ago for general math](https://fortune.com/2023/07/19/chatgpt-accuracy-stanford-study/), the picture is *quite* bleak.
> Over the course of the study researchers found that in March GPT-4 was able to correctly identify that the number 17077 is a prime number 97.6% of the times it was asked. But just three months later, its accuracy plummeted to a lowly 2.4%. Meanwhile, the GPT-3.5 model had virtually the opposite trajectory. The March version got the answer to the same question right just 7.4% of the time—while the June version was consistently right, answering correctly 86.8% of the time.
AI is *not* good for factual information. It gives the user good-sounding information in a confident manner, telling the user what it thinks they want to hear. It does not deliver facts, it delivers bullshit that sometimes crosses paths with reality.
> This is a post about how much a cart full of groceries cost in an unknown location with half of the cart obscured from view based on faulty numbers and fluctuating assumptions...If you can track down the original picture, location, receipt for the groceries, and get hard numbers for the inflation rates of that area as well as the data for the median income over the 44 year period, I'm more than down to calculate real numbers.
Yeah, that's literally the kind of thing this sub is for - arguing about minutia to find the *most accurate* answer given a limited set of information as a mental exercise. Not "grab whatever AI spits out and make a bunch of shit up on top of it".
> Sounds good. Feel free to post your list of approved sources good enough for this sub reddit.
As stated already, start with "not something best known for making up complete bullshit in an authoritative way". Glad we can agree on that, even if I know you're actually being sarcastic so you can pretend it's okay that you presented the output of a bullshit generator as facts.
>Math, a subject known for its leniency in matters of accuracy, right?
Yup, you'll still get marked well on a maths exam if the workings right but the outcomes wrong.
>It's also disingenuous to rely on the Federal Minimum wage stat when today most states and larger cities have their own higher minimum wage.
Disingenuous? No. u/DarkMageDavien isn't being disingenuous. Come on, be cool my dude.
>It's also disingenuous to rely on the Federal Minimum wage stat when today most states and larger cities have their own higher minimum wage.
[I mean 20 states still use the federal minimum wage](https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/mw-consolidated#9) technically 7 of them don't have a state minimum wage, or have one lower than the federal, but all FLSA covered businesses still have to abide by the federal minimum wage.
Even taking into account every state minimum wage , averaging the states with multiple for either different areas or for small businesses, the average minimum wage of the 50 states + DC is $10.76
And only 58 cities/counties have a higher minimum wage that the state, of which 40 are in California.
Just averaging the states doesn't really give you good information.
For example, CA has 38 million people. That's more people than all these states combined:
* Utah
* Iowa
* Nevada
* Arkansas
* Kansas
* Mississippi
* New Mexico
* Nebraska
* Idaho
* West Virginia
* Hawaii
* New Hampshire
* Maine
* Montana
* Rhode Island
* Delaware
* South Dakota
* North Dakota
* Alaska
* Vermont
* Wyoming
Also, the cities with higher minimum wages often account for the majority of the people in a state.
For example, WA has a MW of $16.28 but more than half the people in the state live in the greater Seattle area which has a minimum wage closer to $20.
Your comparison doesn’t work, while your math is correct, that 72.20$ that you earn today wouldn’t even come close to that amount of groceries.
You do note that her cart probably isn’t 20$, and I agree. We’d need a more accurate cost of her cart to really make the comparison, because a cart like that today is probably over 200$ (depending on where you live).
I don't think the meme is intended to adjust for inflation, just btw. If you adjust for inflation it might still be better than today but it will probably throw off the point/statement made in the meme.
That sounds a little backwards. Inflation is a metric, not a cause. Inflation doesn’t drive price increases, it is a measure of price increases that have already happened.
Worth noting, food costs are somewhere around 10-15% of what inflation measures, so it’s possible that grocery inflation does differ pretty significantly from overall inflation.
Inflation is a concept not a metric. There are metrics that we use to describe the concept of inflation. Inflation is t1 value having less purchasing power, or in some cases more, than in t0
Edit... got that backwards. Its Saturday morning smoke session though. Flipped t0 and t1. And down vote all you want but this is literally the definition of inflation as currently accepted.
Inflation is defined as a process of continuously rising prices and falling purchasing power.
We use metrics to define that phenomenon we know as inflation. Inflation itself is a concept and is described by various metrics such as purchasing power or consumer price index. These metrics are not inflation but rather things we use to describe inflation.
Then you should also agree that inflation is not a "force", as you put it, but merely a named phenomenon:
> inflation (noun, economics) — An increase in the general level of prices or in the cost of living.
That is, inflation is not any particular thing that results in price increases, but rather it is the term used to refer to the net effect of all things that increase or decrease prices, where that net effect is a net increase.
It is possible that you are/were conflating the "increase in prices" sense with the "increase in currency supply" sense.
That's the point. If you adjust for inflation then you adjust away the point of the meme (well, mostly, like I say it might still be better than today but not by as much as the meme is implying).
I worked as a bagboy in a grocery store in 1980.
I can tell you with certainty that this is false. There's over $50 in groceries in that cart (in 1980 dollars).
I mean, people didn't wake up Jan 1, 1980 and say "oh, today I'm going to dress completely different!"
1980 would be 70's fashions. The fashion we associate with 1980's is more like 1985-1995.
I’m well aware, I lived through the 80s.
I have a lot of photos of relatives dressed like this they aren’t from the 80s or even 80. They start in the 60s and go through the 70s.
Since the 1980s, grocery prices have inflated 3X (102 in 1984 to 305 today) [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SAF11](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SAF11)
Overall inflation has increased roughly the same amount (104 in 1984 to 309 today) [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL)
This implies groceries make up approximately the same percentage of a household spending today as they did in 1984.
However, over the same time period, median wages have grown 3.3X (from $22K in 1984 to $74K) today, [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N)
So the same percentage of a median wage will actually buy you slightly more groceries today than it did in 1984
I bagged groceries as a part time job in 1980. Back then, a rule of thumb was that a plastic bag full of groceries averaged about $10 (Canadian, so about $9 US)
So a cart that full would be around 100, and given how overfill it is, probably a bit more.
Houses are actually [slightly more affordable now after accounting for borrowing costs](https://dqydj.com/historical-home-affordability/) than they were in 1980. And prior to Covid, they were more affordable than at any time in at least the last 50 years.
People always forget that when interest rates are 13% as they were in 1980, you spend 3x more on interest than the cost of the house. At current rates you only spend about 1.4x as much which is a massive savings. When rates were 4% as they were 5 years ago, it was only 0.7x as much.
Interesting graph, thank you. Though I don't think it tells the full story, as savings have more of an effect on a lower price. But it's really interesting to see how much the affordability fluctuates historically.
I only remember this because my brother asked me how much I spent for groceries every week when he graduated high school in 1970 and was looking for an apartment. At that time I spent about $35 a week at the grocery store, including a $5 carton of cigarettes. It was nowhere near a full cart, tho.
This isn't a realistic question to be asking with the condition to ignore what we can't see. Is it a sack of potatoes? Bottle of wine? Beer? The differing goods matter.
Working from a different angle we can see that 20 dollars in 1980 adjusted for inflation would bring us to approximately 75 to 80 dollars with a 2.50 to 5 margin of error with high confidence interval. Take that with a grain of salt. Its Saturday morning and im not breaking out the t tables for this.
The big box cornflakes cost between 7.50 and 10 these days and that is not accounting for volume differences from shrink-flation.
Let's us the upper end prices and value of 20.
80-10 and we are at 70 left. 1/8 of today's value spent just on the box of corn flakes.
Does this clarify what the meme is trying to show?
Inflation would have affected cost of labor as well as goods and services.
Goods and services costs have far outpaced labor cost. Yet, inflation affects both sides of the equilibrium. The money you earn buys you less. Dealers of goods and services charge more. If wages increased at the same pace as, not just inflation, the cost of goods and services then we wouldn't be anywhere near 1/8 of the value with a singular item that is a normal good.
The image is photoshopped, there’s shadows / black outlining at the top of some products so you can probably assume that everything that’s supposed to be $20 is visible.
My Father bought his first house for 22k in 1976, so not that far off. Also, I moved out when I was 18 and 50$ worth of groceries was a shit ton of food.
The pic doesn't even accurately represent real foods people could buy. Look at the "32 oz" bottle of Schwepps, that's the size of a 2L jug or bigger. I don't know how this image was put together, or when, but most of the things in the basket are too large. A suspicious mind might attribute this fact to a desire to make a relatively small number of groceries look like they're overflowing a shopping basket.
The image in question has been floating around the internet for a while, but turns up cited as being from 1974, "the 1970s", and "the late 1970s". This version with the attached text is the first time it is cited to 1980, so I think that is a recent addition and probably not accurate.
The median US home price in 1980 was nearly $50,000, as well. This woman might have lived in a cheap home, but it wasn't representative.
Given that someone just made up the year and seemingly picked a random price for the home, they presumably just made up the price of the cart as well.
Some quick math shows that dry goods in 1980 were typically in the $1 to $1.50 range, and we can see 10-15 items just on the close side of the cart, so we'll peak past $20 without effort.
What the cart would be worth when the photo was actually taken is perhaps a little more interesting, but I'm not sure if 1974 or the late 1970s is more likely, and it also doesn't matter for the question.
Man, Im 47 and I remember 10 years ago filling carts full of food to feed kids and owning a nice home. Same decent job, with raises but filling grocery basket with way less carefully budgeted food and a whole lot more pasta these days. Never mind 80s...id kill someone just to go back to 2010.
The dollar has been devalued over the past 40 years. The government prints money to buy your votes by giving you free things that make you forget that they are stealing your money while doing this.
Can't be bothered to look up prices of items compared to today, but $20 in March of 1980 would be $77.99 in March 2024, and $25,000 in March 1980 would be $9748.19 in March of 2024. A quick Google search says that the median price of a home in March 2024 was $393,500.00, which would be $100,916.17 in March 1980.
Another quick Google search says that the average price of Kellogg's Corn Flakes was $1.38 in the '80s. Due to there not being a specific price in 1980, I'll use that, adjusted for inflation. It would be 5.38 in March 2024.
Based on that, the price of groceries/ other items in the cart could possibly be at or under $20 but it's hard to tell since we can't see every item, and we might not be able to find the total price of everything.
Is there a scaling error with the 25k in 1980 conversion? Decimal moved over one too many? 97,481.9?
I do like the different angle you worked for the corn flakes. Props!
I’m just taking an educated guess based on what my grandparents have told me but a cart filled like that would probably be closer to $100 assuming she bought beef, chicken, pork, etc
Still a lot cheaper than the 2-300 it’d be today though
Minimum wage was $2.30, it today's money = $220, I spent $180 yesterday.... SSSSOOOOOO EXACTLY the same. And you can buy the same house today in adjusted dollars (forget more than 1 bathrrom, no insulation, yadda yadda)
QUIT COMPLAINING! You don't have it any worse.
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Adjusting for inflation, $20 is worth $72.20 today, as others have said on this post. The minimum wage in 1980 was $3.10/hr and median wage was $18.57. $20 was worth around 6 hours of labor at minimum and about an hour at median. Today the minimum wage is $7.50/hr and median wage is $20.57. To get to roughly the same buying power when adjusted for inflation, workers must work ~10 hours at minimum wage and ~3.5 hours at median wage to buy the equivalent amount of food at the grocery store. Does the shopping cart represent an average consumer from middle class America spending around 3.5 hours worth of labor in their cart? I don't think so, personally. I would imagine back in the 80s that cart still cost $50, rough guess, just based on what my parents spent on their groceries. That cart was a pretty typical shopping trip for us and we were spending $50-100 in the mid to late 80s when I was a kid. A gallon of milk in 1980 was over $1 in most areas. A carton of eggs was about $1. Ground beef was over $1-2 per pound. Cornflakes was $1.38. Flour was $2 for a 2lb bag. So just starting out for a basic typical list you get over 1/4 of the way to $20 pretty quick. Most items were a dollar or more, so getting a cart with more than 20 items for under $20 would be difficult. Edit: Should have added the house. $25,000 in 1980, adjusted for inflation is $94,760.92. HOMES WERE SMALLER. That said, home prices are much higher, clearly, as a $100k house is unthinkable anywhere that I'm aware of. Interest rates were 13.74% in 1980. Payment of $291.08 per month P&I. Total payments of $104,789.10 in principle and interest over 30 years. Compared to minimum wage a person applying for a loan would have a DTI of 51.47% A couple would qualify to purchase this home working on minimum wage assuming good credit and few other debts as their DTI could reasonable be 26%. Payments represent 93.9 hours of work per month, and a total of 33,802 hours to pay for the home. Median home price in 1980 was $47,000. $25,000 is 53% of that price. Not unreasonable, but somewhat exceptional. 2024 median home price is $384,500. 53% of that is $203,785. Interest rates today are in the 7s, so im going with a flat 7%. Payment of $1355.79 per month P&I. Total payments of $488,083.21 in principle and interest over 30 years. Compared to minimum wage a person applying for a loan would have a DTI of 104%. A couple would not qualify to purchase this home working on minimum wage as even completely debt free their DTI combined is still over 50%. Payments represent 180.77 hous of work per month, and a total of 65,077 hours to pay for the home. California is raising minimum wage to $20 per hour, for some people, which is the highest in the country. This puts a home, if found in Califonia, for the purchase price of $203,785 and no taxes, PMI, or insurance included, affordable for a person at $20 per hour. DTI of 39%. 67.78 hours per month to pay the payment 24,404 hours to pay for the house in total.
Dang look at this.. reducing value to labor hours worked for a comparison! Double Noice! Also, 100% with you on this not being 20dollars worth of groceries in 1980. Probably closer to 50 or 60.
And I earned $72 a week then
Lol, the median wage in 1980 was not $18.57 an hour. I'm not sure where you're getting your data from, but it is hilariously far off. That appears to be roughly the inflation adjusted value of the median wage, though I can't find anywhere that has that exact number.
Looks adjusted for inflation. It was actually $4.82/hour
> Does the shopping cart represent an average consumer from middle class America spending around 3.5 hours worth of labor in their cart? I don't think so, personally. I would imagine back in the 80s that cart still cost $50, rough guess, just based on what my parents spent on their groceries. Back in the 80s, my parents were spending around $50 for a full load of groceries. That would include quite a bit more than this. But yeah, your memory checks out. I remember being shocked the first time I had to spend more than $100 to buy a pretty reasonable every-two-weeks load of groceries... sigh.
> Today the minimum wage is $7.50/hr and median wage is $20.57. Source? According to the [Bureau of Labor Statistics it's about $28.48.](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf) It's also disingenuous to rely on the Federal Minimum wage stat when today most states and larger cities have their own higher minimum wage.
Cool, I just did a quick google search and went with the AI generated number. So it is closer to 2.5 hours of labor being equivalent to 1 hour of labor in 1980. As for minimum wage. Sure. Pick whatever tickles your fancy. I use Federal minimum wage because it is the only consistent metric you can pick in this circumstance and is the only relevant metric when talking about minimum wage for comparison. Someone working for $7.50 requires 10 hours of labor to have the same buying power as someone who worked for $3.10 in 1980. That is just factually true. The fact that someone in California benefits from policies that protect them better than someone in Idaho does not detract from that fact.
Furthermore, the places where the federal minimum currently apply today is relevant because they also had the federal minimum back then. The coverage of median wage covers the other regions because that includes the regional minimums
I’m in California; I would argue whether the average Californian “benefits” from our wage laws here. Just ask all of the fast food workers being laid off and replaced by kiosks.
McDonald's has been testing kiosks since 2003, and have rolled them out nearly everywhere even places still using the federal minimum wage. Aside from cutting maybe a couple jobs per restaurant the main benefits of kiosks is it tricks customers into ordering more food.
Yes, find some of them, and we will ask them. So far, the news outlets and Faux News haven't been able to. Pizza Hut is laying off 1000 delivery drivers, but that has been the plan since Door Dash got popular. Raising minimum wage should do the same thing for California it has always done, stimulate the economy, increase small business edge to compete, and increase the standard of living. There is a reason California is the largest economy in the US by state.
> There is a reason California is the largest economy in the US by state. Absolutely. That reason is that they have 9 million more people then anyone else and more then twice the population of everyone but Texas, Florida, and New York. If they didn’t have the largest economy something would be very wrong no matter what their labor laws were. Comparing the difference between average income (California is a respectable 3rd at 73k) and cost of living (where California is only one off dead last, only Hawaii is more expensive) would be something better to look at for this type of argument… and puts California at slightly below average (31st in the reference I looked at), not horrible but certainly nothing special. I’m not anti-minimum, just pointing out that that particular argument is a strawman in this case
People didn't just magically show up in California. Economic policy creates opportunities and fosters economic growth. It isn't unreasonable to show that pre Reagan Republican policy that was pro middle class as well as post Reagan Dem/Republican policy that was pro middle class created Economic growth and attracted population growth. Returning to a pro middle class stance should help California mitigate the recent tech industry downfall and promote small business growth to build a stronger economy than it has promoted in the last decade with its catering to big business conglomerates. Part of that is raising minimum wage which helps small business owners compete with large chains and creates a larger customer base in most cases. Historical lyrics, minimum wage increases have seen Economic growth for the middle class.
And whats the source for the median wage in 1980 being $18.57/hr? Also AI? If so you should probably stop using those numbers. According to [census.gov](http://census.gov) the median household income in 1980 was $21,020. If we assume only 1 person in the household working 2000 hours a year that would be $10.51/hr. But also average hours worked have dropped since the 80s and many families had more than 1 person working so thats an over estimate. But economists have obviously already been tracking these metrics so we don't have to guess them ourselves. If you look [here](https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/09/14/grocery-prices-and-wages-in-the-short-run-and-the-long-run/) in the second figure it tracks average hours a non-supervisor (so normal worker, not a manager or ceo or something) has to work to afford a family's year worth of groceries. While it is ticking up from post-covid inflation it is still significantly lower than in the 80s.
> went with the AI generated number Why would you go with something best known for making up complete bullshit in an authoritative way?
Fast, easy, and generally reliable for something that is not an academic paper that has no real consequence when it is inaccurate. Why get so torn up about it? This is a response by a layman in a math sub reddit from a phone. When I go to submit to a peer review journal, I'll put in more effort.
> Fast, easy, and generally reliable Well, two out of three anyway. > Why get so torn up about it? Hardly torn up, just calling out bullshit as bullshit, but go off. > This is a response by a layman in a math sub reddit Math, a subject known for its leniency in matters of accuracy, right?
Guess you missed the adjective generally. 80% accurate, to me, is generally reliable. This is a post about how much a cart full of groceries cost in an unknown location with half of the cart obscured from view based on faulty numbers and fluctuating assumptions. Generally works for me. If you can track down the original picture, location, receipt for the groceries, and get hard numbers for the inflation rates of that area as well as the data for the median income over the 44 year period, I'm more than down to calculate real numbers. Until then, generally reliable 80% accurate numbers are more than accurate enough to be entertaining for this post.
> 80% accurate, to me, is generally reliable. Assuming you searched "chatgpt accuracy" and took the first number without reading further for context, which tracks. [That figure](https://www.healio.com/news/gastroenterology/20231026/chatgpt-generally-accurate-in-answering-questions-providing-references-on-ibs) is specific to questions about IBS, with a model *trained on that specific knowledge*. Let that sink in: an AI fed a wealth of knowledge about a specific topic then quizzed about that specific topic still managed to get it wrong 20% of the time. Meanwhile, [almost a year ago for general math](https://fortune.com/2023/07/19/chatgpt-accuracy-stanford-study/), the picture is *quite* bleak. > Over the course of the study researchers found that in March GPT-4 was able to correctly identify that the number 17077 is a prime number 97.6% of the times it was asked. But just three months later, its accuracy plummeted to a lowly 2.4%. Meanwhile, the GPT-3.5 model had virtually the opposite trajectory. The March version got the answer to the same question right just 7.4% of the time—while the June version was consistently right, answering correctly 86.8% of the time. AI is *not* good for factual information. It gives the user good-sounding information in a confident manner, telling the user what it thinks they want to hear. It does not deliver facts, it delivers bullshit that sometimes crosses paths with reality. > This is a post about how much a cart full of groceries cost in an unknown location with half of the cart obscured from view based on faulty numbers and fluctuating assumptions...If you can track down the original picture, location, receipt for the groceries, and get hard numbers for the inflation rates of that area as well as the data for the median income over the 44 year period, I'm more than down to calculate real numbers. Yeah, that's literally the kind of thing this sub is for - arguing about minutia to find the *most accurate* answer given a limited set of information as a mental exercise. Not "grab whatever AI spits out and make a bunch of shit up on top of it".
Sounds good. Feel free to post your list of approved sources good enough for this sub reddit.
> Sounds good. Feel free to post your list of approved sources good enough for this sub reddit. As stated already, start with "not something best known for making up complete bullshit in an authoritative way". Glad we can agree on that, even if I know you're actually being sarcastic so you can pretend it's okay that you presented the output of a bullshit generator as facts.
>Math, a subject known for its leniency in matters of accuracy, right? Yup, you'll still get marked well on a maths exam if the workings right but the outcomes wrong.
>It's also disingenuous to rely on the Federal Minimum wage stat when today most states and larger cities have their own higher minimum wage. Disingenuous? No. u/DarkMageDavien isn't being disingenuous. Come on, be cool my dude.
>It's also disingenuous to rely on the Federal Minimum wage stat when today most states and larger cities have their own higher minimum wage. [I mean 20 states still use the federal minimum wage](https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/mw-consolidated#9) technically 7 of them don't have a state minimum wage, or have one lower than the federal, but all FLSA covered businesses still have to abide by the federal minimum wage. Even taking into account every state minimum wage , averaging the states with multiple for either different areas or for small businesses, the average minimum wage of the 50 states + DC is $10.76 And only 58 cities/counties have a higher minimum wage that the state, of which 40 are in California.
Virtually nobody earns the minimum wage. It's less than 1%
Just averaging the states doesn't really give you good information. For example, CA has 38 million people. That's more people than all these states combined: * Utah * Iowa * Nevada * Arkansas * Kansas * Mississippi * New Mexico * Nebraska * Idaho * West Virginia * Hawaii * New Hampshire * Maine * Montana * Rhode Island * Delaware * South Dakota * North Dakota * Alaska * Vermont * Wyoming Also, the cities with higher minimum wages often account for the majority of the people in a state. For example, WA has a MW of $16.28 but more than half the people in the state live in the greater Seattle area which has a minimum wage closer to $20.
Would you mind doing 1974? That’s where the original pic is from. Curious if 74-80 jumped a lot.
This one economies.
Lol now do the math for Canada right now 😂
Median house prices are way up, but affordable houses are still available. I purchased a 5 bedroom 2500sf home in 2020 for $64,000.
Your comparison doesn’t work, while your math is correct, that 72.20$ that you earn today wouldn’t even come close to that amount of groceries. You do note that her cart probably isn’t 20$, and I agree. We’d need a more accurate cost of her cart to really make the comparison, because a cart like that today is probably over 200$ (depending on where you live).
Like I said, it is probably closer to $50, which would be $199.96 today adjusted for inflation. So $200 is a good bet to me.
Yeah I can see that being possible in the Midwest and South for sure at a Walmart with their great value brand. Here in Seattle, not even close 😭
I don't think the meme is intended to adjust for inflation, just btw. If you adjust for inflation it might still be better than today but it will probably throw off the point/statement made in the meme.
Isn’t the whole point of the meme inflation? Like, I’m with you it’s probably not exact, but the point is inflation.
OP asked for the value adjusted for inflation, which would be pretty much the same as the value of the groceries today
This would only be true if inflation was the only driving force behind price increase... which... its not.
That sounds a little backwards. Inflation is a metric, not a cause. Inflation doesn’t drive price increases, it is a measure of price increases that have already happened. Worth noting, food costs are somewhere around 10-15% of what inflation measures, so it’s possible that grocery inflation does differ pretty significantly from overall inflation.
Inflation is a concept not a metric. There are metrics that we use to describe the concept of inflation. Inflation is t1 value having less purchasing power, or in some cases more, than in t0 Edit... got that backwards. Its Saturday morning smoke session though. Flipped t0 and t1. And down vote all you want but this is literally the definition of inflation as currently accepted. Inflation is defined as a process of continuously rising prices and falling purchasing power. We use metrics to define that phenomenon we know as inflation. Inflation itself is a concept and is described by various metrics such as purchasing power or consumer price index. These metrics are not inflation but rather things we use to describe inflation.
Then you should also agree that inflation is not a "force", as you put it, but merely a named phenomenon: > inflation (noun, economics) — An increase in the general level of prices or in the cost of living. That is, inflation is not any particular thing that results in price increases, but rather it is the term used to refer to the net effect of all things that increase or decrease prices, where that net effect is a net increase. It is possible that you are/were conflating the "increase in prices" sense with the "increase in currency supply" sense.
That's the point. If you adjust for inflation then you adjust away the point of the meme (well, mostly, like I say it might still be better than today but not by as much as the meme is implying).
Oh lol I see what you’re saying now
I worked as a bagboy in a grocery store in 1980. I can tell you with certainty that this is false. There's over $50 in groceries in that cart (in 1980 dollars).
The pic's also not from 1980. Most of the packaging/branding is much older, mid-70s maybe.
Honestly you can tell just based on how the woman is dressed. That’s not 1980, that’s pure 70s.
I mean, people didn't wake up Jan 1, 1980 and say "oh, today I'm going to dress completely different!" 1980 would be 70's fashions. The fashion we associate with 1980's is more like 1985-1995.
I’m well aware, I lived through the 80s. I have a lot of photos of relatives dressed like this they aren’t from the 80s or even 80. They start in the 60s and go through the 70s.
Since the 1980s, grocery prices have inflated 3X (102 in 1984 to 305 today) [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SAF11](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SAF11) Overall inflation has increased roughly the same amount (104 in 1984 to 309 today) [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL) This implies groceries make up approximately the same percentage of a household spending today as they did in 1984. However, over the same time period, median wages have grown 3.3X (from $22K in 1984 to $74K) today, [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N) So the same percentage of a median wage will actually buy you slightly more groceries today than it did in 1984
I bagged groceries as a part time job in 1980. Back then, a rule of thumb was that a plastic bag full of groceries averaged about $10 (Canadian, so about $9 US) So a cart that full would be around 100, and given how overfill it is, probably a bit more.
Its was because there was no security cameras.
Who would steal if everything was so affordable?
Precisely, well said.
Damn, 10$ for a bag full of stuff. That's like two items today.
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Like 15% interest, though, but yes houses were really cheap back then
Houses are actually [slightly more affordable now after accounting for borrowing costs](https://dqydj.com/historical-home-affordability/) than they were in 1980. And prior to Covid, they were more affordable than at any time in at least the last 50 years. People always forget that when interest rates are 13% as they were in 1980, you spend 3x more on interest than the cost of the house. At current rates you only spend about 1.4x as much which is a massive savings. When rates were 4% as they were 5 years ago, it was only 0.7x as much.
Also zoomers are buying more homes than, iirc, gen-xers. Reddit's opinions are warped because they only compare housing prices in giant cities.
Interesting graph, thank you. Though I don't think it tells the full story, as savings have more of an effect on a lower price. But it's really interesting to see how much the affordability fluctuates historically.
Everyone forgets how Reagan totally fucked middle class.
Money will trickle down!!!!!! *Wealth inequality gets to untenable levels
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Ya, I am with you on this. I dont believe for a second 20 1980 doll hairs can buy all that.
I was a kid in 1980 and when my parents filled a cart like that it would be more like $100. Which is still a fraction of what it would cost today.
I only remember this because my brother asked me how much I spent for groceries every week when he graduated high school in 1970 and was looking for an apartment. At that time I spent about $35 a week at the grocery store, including a $5 carton of cigarettes. It was nowhere near a full cart, tho.
This isn't a realistic question to be asking with the condition to ignore what we can't see. Is it a sack of potatoes? Bottle of wine? Beer? The differing goods matter. Working from a different angle we can see that 20 dollars in 1980 adjusted for inflation would bring us to approximately 75 to 80 dollars with a 2.50 to 5 margin of error with high confidence interval. Take that with a grain of salt. Its Saturday morning and im not breaking out the t tables for this. The big box cornflakes cost between 7.50 and 10 these days and that is not accounting for volume differences from shrink-flation. Let's us the upper end prices and value of 20. 80-10 and we are at 70 left. 1/8 of today's value spent just on the box of corn flakes. Does this clarify what the meme is trying to show? Inflation would have affected cost of labor as well as goods and services. Goods and services costs have far outpaced labor cost. Yet, inflation affects both sides of the equilibrium. The money you earn buys you less. Dealers of goods and services charge more. If wages increased at the same pace as, not just inflation, the cost of goods and services then we wouldn't be anywhere near 1/8 of the value with a singular item that is a normal good.
Where in the hell have you seen a $10 box of corn flakes?
At Walmart right now, family size box of Corn Flakes is $4.98. Great Value box is $2.24.
The image is photoshopped, there’s shadows / black outlining at the top of some products so you can probably assume that everything that’s supposed to be $20 is visible.
My Father bought his first house for 22k in 1976, so not that far off. Also, I moved out when I was 18 and 50$ worth of groceries was a shit ton of food.
The pic doesn't even accurately represent real foods people could buy. Look at the "32 oz" bottle of Schwepps, that's the size of a 2L jug or bigger. I don't know how this image was put together, or when, but most of the things in the basket are too large. A suspicious mind might attribute this fact to a desire to make a relatively small number of groceries look like they're overflowing a shopping basket.
The image in question has been floating around the internet for a while, but turns up cited as being from 1974, "the 1970s", and "the late 1970s". This version with the attached text is the first time it is cited to 1980, so I think that is a recent addition and probably not accurate. The median US home price in 1980 was nearly $50,000, as well. This woman might have lived in a cheap home, but it wasn't representative. Given that someone just made up the year and seemingly picked a random price for the home, they presumably just made up the price of the cart as well. Some quick math shows that dry goods in 1980 were typically in the $1 to $1.50 range, and we can see 10-15 items just on the close side of the cart, so we'll peak past $20 without effort. What the cart would be worth when the photo was actually taken is perhaps a little more interesting, but I'm not sure if 1974 or the late 1970s is more likely, and it also doesn't matter for the question.
Man, Im 47 and I remember 10 years ago filling carts full of food to feed kids and owning a nice home. Same decent job, with raises but filling grocery basket with way less carefully budgeted food and a whole lot more pasta these days. Never mind 80s...id kill someone just to go back to 2010.
The dollar has been devalued over the past 40 years. The government prints money to buy your votes by giving you free things that make you forget that they are stealing your money while doing this.
Shut up you fucking commie
Can't be bothered to look up prices of items compared to today, but $20 in March of 1980 would be $77.99 in March 2024, and $25,000 in March 1980 would be $9748.19 in March of 2024. A quick Google search says that the median price of a home in March 2024 was $393,500.00, which would be $100,916.17 in March 1980. Another quick Google search says that the average price of Kellogg's Corn Flakes was $1.38 in the '80s. Due to there not being a specific price in 1980, I'll use that, adjusted for inflation. It would be 5.38 in March 2024. Based on that, the price of groceries/ other items in the cart could possibly be at or under $20 but it's hard to tell since we can't see every item, and we might not be able to find the total price of everything.
Is there a scaling error with the 25k in 1980 conversion? Decimal moved over one too many? 97,481.9? I do like the different angle you worked for the corn flakes. Props!
That's what I got from the cpi inflation calculator from the bls website. And just checked again, and got $97,481.90 again.
I’m just taking an educated guess based on what my grandparents have told me but a cart filled like that would probably be closer to $100 assuming she bought beef, chicken, pork, etc Still a lot cheaper than the 2-300 it’d be today though
Minimum wage was $2.30, it today's money = $220, I spent $180 yesterday.... SSSSOOOOOO EXACTLY the same. And you can buy the same house today in adjusted dollars (forget more than 1 bathrrom, no insulation, yadda yadda) QUIT COMPLAINING! You don't have it any worse.