Quote:
Originally Posted by Enoch Root
I have no doubt that a coffee in a cafe was more, in real dollars, then than it is now.
The point though, is that no one was doing it - no one got their coffee that way. The idea of 'buying' a coffee everyday was a completely new trend that started in the nineties (or at least really caught on then).
People didn't go to coffee shops every morning. Nor did they have personal phones, personal computers, subscriptions for music, movies, etc. Nothing like that existed.
|
This doesn't really jive with reality. Sure they didn't have personal computers or portable phones in the '70s, because those things didn't exist. Just like people in the '30s didn't have televisions in their home.
So yeah, they didn't spend as much money on coffee from a cafe, but they also spent a lot more on things like cigarettes and alcohol. And people didn't travel as often, but when they did they spent far, far more than they do today to get where they were going and the end result was that overall travel spending hasn't changed too much.
The fact is, in the 1970s people spent a far higher proportion of their income on consumer goods and services than they do now and that's indisputable. The largest increases in expenses since than have occurred in things like housing, health care, education, and financial services/insurance. Not a lot of discretionary spending in there so I don't really buy the idea that people are choosing to live more lavishly now compared to the 1970s.