"Mordechai Housman" > wrote in message
news:HiSog.13123$6d1.10770@trndny09...
> When I was in retail, during the mid-to-late eighties, an almost-elderly
> customer came into the store and asked the price of a certain item. When I
> told him that it cost $23.00 (American), he sputtered, aghast.
>
> "But fifty years ago they were only five dollars!"
>
> I was amused. I asked him how much bus fare had cost fifty years ago.
>
> "Five cents," he said.
>
> "And now they're how much?"
>
> "One dollar." (That's more or less how much it was back then, if I
> remember correctly.)
>
> "So that means that bus fare is now twenty times more than it was fifty
> years ago. So this item increased to only five times as much, and some
> other things, such as the bus fare, have increased TWENTY times. So how
> can you complain?"
>
> It boggled my mind that someone could actually complain that a price had
> increased in fifty years, as if this were the very first time he'd
> encountered a price increase in fifty years.

DH used to work for a somewhat large business owned by and old and somewhat
eccentric man who never paid for anything himself. He had assistants who did
all his shopping and paid his bill. If you had the misfortune of going out
to dinner with him, you'd find that when dinner was over, he'd simply get up
and walk out, without a thought to who would pay.

If one of his assistants was there, presumably they'd take care of it, and
if it was one of his regular places, they'd put it on his tab which would be
handled later. But if he invited you out and there were no assistants and no
regular tab, you paid the bill, never mind that he said he was taking you
out for dinner.

This guy, literally, did not know what a loaf of bread cost. Or anything
else. He never carried cash, and I don't know if he had a credit card, but
it's a pretty sure thing he never used it himself.

Maybe he was the guy who walked into your store that day.

Donna