Becca wrote:

> Puester wrote:
> >
> > My parents owned a grocery store from ~1947-1965 and they delivered
> > every day w/o any complaints.
> > (Well, my dad DID complain when not-so-regular customers would call
> > during a blizzard and ask for
> > delivery of just a pack of cigarettes or chewing gum, but that's
> > another story.) Many people were elderly
> > but many also didn't own cars for quite a while after WWII especially
> > if they lived in the city or on a
> > bus route. Public transit was cheap and convenient in our city.
> >
> > I enjoyed taking orders over the phone from people I knew. Very few
> > were that fussy because they
> > knew what they were getting from us and it was good quality.
>
>
> My mother saved some old receipts from a grocery store delivered, and
> this was before I was born. It was a surprise to see the cost of foods
> like eggs, coffee and sugar.


Run those prices through an inflation calculator (Goog for such, westegg.com
is one ) and you might see that those prices adjusted to present - day
dollars are higher than what we are paying now. 50 years ago the average
household IIRC spent something like a quarter of disposable income on food,
today, it's about half of that. Food has never been cheaper in history...we
are the first nation in history that has a very high percentage of poor
people who are morbidly obese...someone from the Depression would be very
shocked to see that.

Somewhere around I have some reproductions of WWII newspapers (bought them
at the gift shop in the Smithsonian, you can find them in most history
museum gift shops), looking at the grocery ads most items were at least
twice what they'd be now, and this was with OPA price controls and rationing
to ensure fair pricing and a nutritious diet for the war effort (we were
lucky, we had record HUGE harvests during most of the war, and we fed our
allies and then much of the world for years after with our bounteous "Golden
Harvests". In a place like the UK war rationing did not completely wind
down until _1955_). Also take into account that average household income
was less than half c. 1945 what it is now...po' folks now can eat like the
rich of 70 years ago.


--
Best
Greg