Behind a fellow at QuikTrip (acquiring the Morning Dew), I overheard the following, as he pushed a one-hundred-dollar bill across the counter:
Piles of Cash Don't Go as Far!
“Try seventy dollars on pump six.”
“Sure that’ll fill it?” asked the clerk.
“I’m sure it won’t,” the fellow responded, “but it’ll get me where I’m going.”
Tucked inside a book that came in for trade this morning, I found a sales receipt from a major book retailer. (You could figure out which one in two guesses.) The total was seventy dollars for four books. In this little bookstore, seventy dollars will buy a couple of bags-full.
I’m at the age where I don’t feel the need to disguise it any longer, so I can admit here that seventy dollars was the monthly rent on my first apartment. And to have that amount on the first of the month required setting aside a majority of my weekly paychecks.
Seventy bucks worth of gasoline! Four books for seventy dollars. (Actually, some individual college texts retail for twice that amount, these days!)
In high school, I drove a motorcycle to class. ‘Scooter’ is probably a more accurate term, but if I told you the truth, that I could fill that gasoline tank with a single quarter, you’d think I was driving a skateboard. The ‘cycle was bigger than the ones my friends had, but gasoline cost about the same as ice-water.
I user to roll my eyes at the “back when I was a kid” stories I’d hear from older co-workers, but I understand now that they weren’t so much idle reminiscences as they were expressions of surprise at how things change over time. And given the perspective of ample time, such as I’ve had, things like paying $1.65 for a plastic bottle of Mountain Dew make the eyebrows pop up automatically – remembering when that bottle (made of sturdy glass) would have set me back a single dime.
I hope I live forever – not so much to keep seeing changes – I just can’t even imagine how much it costs to die these days.
