Catch the poster in Safeway's window:
Butter 44p
Swiss Roll 13p
Ice Cream 39p
Birdseye Peas/Pies 16p (my eyesight is shocking)
Looking at the cheapest available products on Tesco's website, butter is 85p, swiss roll 25p, ice cream 89p and Birdseye peas/pies £2.00
Who wants to join me on a trip back to the 70's?
I reckon it's down to buying power, and we're better off today. Consider that:
Average wage in 1976 was £70 (source
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1168149.stm)
Average wage in 2015 was £493 (source
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/wages)
Obviously they're both from different sources, but they're probably not that far off.
So in '76 you could buy 159 packs of butter for your weekly wage, but in 2015 you could buy 580 packs.
Swiss roll was 538 packs against 1972 packs now.
Ice cream was 179 packs against 553 packs now.
Only peas (or pies) bucks the trend with 437 packs against 246 packs now (but the modern ones might be bigger frozen packs?).
Petrol was also 77 pence per gallon against around £4.76 (roughy saying £1.05 per litre).
So you could buy 91 gals then against 103 gals now.
A pint of beer was 32 pence (from the source above) against £3.31 now (source
http://cask-marque.co.uk/cask-matters/good-pub-guide-2015-reveals-cost-average-pint/)
So you're a bit worse off buying pints today, at 218 pints then against 148 pints now (but I reckon that the quoted £3.31 price seems a bit high).
But, if my memory is good, around 1982 (when we started buying a few cans of beer before the local disco) cans were about 50 pence from the local off sales. You can still buy them for around 50 pence (but you probably need to buy a multi pack from a supermarket to get that price). We don't really buy cans much, but I'm pretty sure they can't be more than £1 from the same off license as 30 odd years ago. So they've only doubled but the wages have gone up, say, seven fold?
However, part of what makes today seem more expensive is that we all need a car (often two) since we need to travel out of our local town for work. And we all want a bigger house than we did years ago, with at least one en suite, and we want to own it. Plus we want some foreign holidays, a big tv, yada yada yada.
