Prices have inflated so much over the past 10 years that a $20 bill buys as much as $5 did back then.
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Not totally, but it depends, inflation doesn’t happen equally between goods, but in a general sense thats a bit high.
Someone find a nerd to do the math.
Based on the value of $1 USD on today, Jan 23 2026, on what date was $5 worth what $20 is today?
(Authors note: I’m gonna fuckin off myself if the answer is post Y2k)
On this website, it says that it was on 1980.
$5 in April 1980 dollars is the inflation adjusted equivalent of $20 in December 2025:
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=5.00&year1=198004&year2=202512
Totally.
Now I see something for $50 and im like oh not bad.
Then im like WAIT THAT WAS 20 DOLLARS 7 YEARS AGO WTF!
I use 1930 as the base year. So the $20 USD bill is actually the new $1 bill.
I want five dollar coins
This is something that bugs me. People back in the day could actually make useful purchases with coins. I want a 50c, 1d, 2d, 5d, and 10d coins. Loose the penny and maybe even nickels
We ditched the penny in Canada years ago. Nickels and dimes are near useless
I still dream about 5 for 5.95 Arby’s roast beefs
When I was in SC, if the gamecocks won, they had a deal 5 roast beef and cheddars for $5. Bet your ass I took advantage of that.
That used to be their normal everyday deal in the 90s. 5 for 5. Then it was 4 for 5, then 3 for 5. Now I don’t even know if you can get one sandwich for that.
I remember sonic and big league burgers had 5 for 5 regularly fucking loved their burgers.
Nope, single sandwich is a roughly $6
If it’s Arby’s I’m assuming it’s a nightmare?
Nah, it’s processed, but not bad. I like it.
Tastes so good, or at least it did years ago.
Yeah except that’s not even close to true. $5 in December 2015 is worth $6.85 in December 2025 (the most recent data available).
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=5&year1=201512&year2=202512
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That’s just as wrong as OP. You need to use the Subway metric.
Five Dollar Footlongs ended a decade ago. Now they’re 11-17$.
The Five Dollar Footlong was a promo created in 2003 when the normal price of a footlong was $6, by a single franchisee. By the time the promo went national, supported by the chain itself (and a national ad campaign), in 2008, that became a big enough deal to really move sales. And they watered it down at some point (by late 2010 when I was working next to a Subway and no other lunch options, I remember it only being a specific sandwich that rotated monthly, with all other footlongs regularly priced). And it was eventually discontinued in 2012.
It’s hard to pin this particular promo and call it totally representative of all pricing in the mid 2010s.
Now they advertise $5 shorties and the millennial in me has to do a doubletake of incredulity
Relative to what? Gold? British Pounds? Crude oil?
All measures of value are relative; they only mean anything based on their value relative to other things.
Commodity prices might drop significantly when an economy crashes and there’s low demand (look at the price of soybeans in 2025), but consumer prices either stay the same or continue to rise (didn’t see your grocery bill shrink when commodity prices dropped, did you?)
Economists might measure the value of the USD against high-level metrics such as commodities and precious metals, but what matters to the average person is the value of the USD relative to consumer prices.
Maybe technically the USD only increased in value by $1.85 in ten years, but if the cost of bread or toilet paper or a meal at a restaurant doubled or quadrupled in that time, then really the value of the dollar dropped significantly as far as the consumer is concerned.
The cost of bread, toilet paper, and restaurant meals for the average American may have increased significantly more than $5 -> $6.85, but I promise it hasn’t literally quadrupled. Things are unacceptably bad but this isn’t Turkey yet. Do you have any indication that for the average American the average purchased good has quadrupled in ten years? The responses here are almost as unhinged as the takes over in MAGA world. This is insane.
I can proof with literal receipts that prices of goods have gone up 50-100% in less than 5 years.
This is a weird time to claim someone is being unhinged and comparing them to maga. One even claim that is being unhinged and maga like.
I’ll allow OP a little bit of hyperbole to get their point across; this is an internet forum, after all, not a peer-reviewed journal…
It’s not a little bit of hyperbole, I literally linked to a calculator that uses the Consumer Price Index. OP’s claim isn’t even vaguely in the realm of the actual consumer price increase.
My point is that those high-level macroeconomic metrics are completely divorced from the financial realities of ordinary people.
If you think the cost of living has only risen slightly relative to the buying power of the average wage-earner, then you must be sheltered and insulated by having wealth and income levels that are well-above average.
No, I’m extremely heavily laden with debt and barely getting by in one of the most expensive areas of the country, but good try. I get that the CPI isn’t perfect, but there is literally no data from any source indicating that we have experienced 400% price increases, generally speaking, in the last 10 years. You’re just going on vibes, selective memory, and anecdotes and you’re giving ammunition to fascists who try to discredit us by pointing to people like you and saying “see? These people have no tether to reality. Look at any actual statistics and you’ll see they’re wrong.” People like you make us look bad and made uninformed people incorrectly believe that both sides of the political divide are lying and living in their own delusional reality. Do better.
Except I never claimed that prices literally quadrupled. I merely explained how OP is utilizing a hyperbole to riff on a common experience that many people are having, which is that the buying power of the USD has been in sharp decline for long enough that people can already feel the difference.
What’s true is that $20 used to feel like a decent amount of money, and now it feels like barely anything; the way $5 used to. Nowadays you’d be hard-pressed to go anywhere and spend $5 or less.
You’re literally in the showerthoughts community, it’s not meant to present literal, accurate statistics. Its MO is basically to have at least some inaccuracy or logical inconsistency, because when you’re in the shower you don’t have a computer in front of you to immediately verify every heuristical thought process that “seems about right.” The “sounds close to truth, but technically isn’t” is what makes it a “shower thought.”
I don’t believe you.
Many inflation metrics are based on a “basket of goods”. Let’s say a basket of goods in 1990 is a month’s rent, a new TV, a month’s groceries, three outfits, some toys for the kids, a digital camera, and a porno magazine.
In 2026, people can barely afford rent and groceries. People aren’t buying a basket of goods. They’re downloading their porn for free. The comparison is flawed.
Yeah, even ignoring that, theres no way that claim is valid. The price of food here has over doubled since 2019. I used to work at a store during that time and got a burrito every single day, after tax it came to $1.03. Now, at the same store, same burrito, it cost $2.46 after tax. My $3 box of snack cakes comes to $5 now, cigarettes have almost trippled, and my rent has almost doubled since i moved here in 2020. Almost everything here is at least twice as expensive as it was in 2019, and my wage has only gone from about $9/h to about $12/h. I even have pictures of price tags from then, once i find them ill upload then/now pictures of the price tags.
Obviously depends on the specific item.
Here’s the national averages for:
Or an entire table of food items they’ve been tracking monthly prices on for years.
The price of specific items has doubled
Rent, which has outpaced inflation had a national average of $1149 in 2019 and was $1650 in 2025 in order for average rent to have doubled you have to go all the way back to 2007ish
Instead of tracking a burrito, track how much 1lb of chicken cost or bananas or broccoli
No, instead let’s base our economic reality on pure vibes and the most extreme, specific examples we can personally remember 🙄
It’s the lemmy way. How else will people grab attention?
Looks like you have to go back to 1979 for it to be true
So they were off by a factor of 2.35 (47 years is 2.35x 20 years)
subway footlongs are indeed $20 on the high end in major metro areas.
Also, make sure to bring your tape measure, shrinkflation is all too real…
Subway argued in court that “Footlong” is a trademarked brand, and does not mean it’s 12 inches. Then they argued that the average consumer would KNOW this, and not be confused by these terms.
Footlong is a subway branded term for their bigger sub. Foot long is a generic term that means one foot long.
Yes, that’s real. I’m not joking. They legitimately did this. Just like Fox News argued in court that their station is NOT a news network. It is an entertainment network, presenting purely opinion based stories. As such, they have ZERO obligation for their stories to contain even a shred of truth or fact to their stories. And “Fox News” is a branded term, not relating to, or presenting factual news reports.
On a related note, would anyone like to buy “Bigger Penis Pills”? I mean, it’s just condensed sugar in tablet form. But I’ve branded it as “Bigger Penis Pills”, and selling it for $100 per pill.
Didnt fox news have to change their name to fox entertainment?
Fox News Entertainment I thought
A group of business and law school people got paid to peddle that bullshit.
It’s part of how our own money is used against us.
Okay, Subway trademarked the footlong, then they cut it in half if you order a 6 inch…
Did they fucking trademark the size of an inch too?
No. That was one of the things being sued over.
Good, fuck Subway, and that’s even considering I used to work for them, in security camera maintenance, before this whole AI/enshittification era though…
In Finland there’s a product called “Meter pizza” that’s about 60 cm long, but then there’s also a “centimeter pizza” that’s way longer than a centimeter.
What the fuck.
Gasoline price is about the same and the price of noodles hasn’t gone up much. But the price of rent and weed has skyrocketed, so…
🤷
Weed still costs the same as 20 years ago here in Copenhagen, but the food prices have doubled.
New plan. Cars that run on noodles!
Wait, gas prices didn’t go up. That makes no sense…
Ok. Houses made out of noodles, and we’ll all smoke gasoline!
Ramen noodle packs make good insulation for walls
The cost of producing gas definitely went up. It’s just subsidized more from everyone’s taxes.
I think we already all smoke gasoline anyways, it’s called exhaust… ☹️
and the price of noodles hasn’t gone up much
From 8.3 cents per package to 33.3 per seems like a jump that qualifies as “much”. And if you get it on scamazon it’s 62.9 cents per.
This is based off the cost of a 24 pack of Maruchan chicken ramen packets.
I did some research and it looks like the price of maruchan scales exactly with inflation.
I won’t lie, I haven’t really kept up too much with the price of noodles over the past decades, but I loosely recall them going for somewhere around 18 cents a pack back around 10 years ago.
Yeah, even those numbers don’t sound wallet happy, but hey, at least we don’t have to worry about pennies anymore, so of course everything rounds up right?
Fuck. ☹️
Depends on where you live. I can get an ounce of weed, 28g for you people with better measurement systems, for $22-50 and I have a large variety of strains to choose from.
If your ounce weighs 28g, you got shorted 2g…
I guess for that price it doesn’t really matter, but it’s about the principle!
1 oz = 28.35 g
Maybe that 1/3 of a gram is shorting someone, but a single ounce is closer to 28g than to 30g.
Oh shit, you’re right. My weed-addled brain got “1/8th = 3.5g” mixed up with “1/4 = 7g” and came up with “7.5×4=30”
These things do happen…
Thanks homie, but I had to spend my lunch money on tires and rent. At least beer and cigars are still cheaper than a bottle of water here, so… 🤷
Legal weed is one of the biggest scams on the planet, along with rent.
Ah yes, people no longer going to jail over a flower to be exploited for slave labor and lose all future job prospects is such a scam 🤷♀️
It’s not that its legal; it’s the legal market.
Everyone buying their weed legally is getting scammed to high-heaven.
Everyone who lives under capitalism is getting scammed to high heaven, I don’t know why we should limit that statement to encompass only one market…
Some are getting scammed significantly harder than others.
We live in a world of scammers and scammees. Some people even scam others while getting scammed themselves. It’s scammers all the way down.
Ye olde halfpence is now a nickel!
definitely someone a few hundred years ago
During thr gold-standard era, 1GBP was around 5USD, but a halfpenny was 1/480 of a pound, so a little more than a cent. The large-format cents issued up to 1857 were similar in size to the halfpennies of the late 1700s.
Doubtful, considering money back then was pinned to something like gold or silver.Some excellent points in the replies. I withdraw my statement!
Are you under the impression that this prevented inflation somehow?
Spoiler: it didn’t.
Shhh don’t tell them about what happened after both world wars
Or the time Ulysses Grant ordered the Treasury to flood the gold market - temporarily tanking the US economy - in order to crush his own brother in laws market manipulation scheme.
The US went off the gold standard in 1971 and OP is talking about 10 years ago, so 2016.Disregard. The commenter is referring to the 100 or so years ago.
I’m replying to the “100 years ago” guy talking about halfpence.
Ahh, fair. I misread that.
Becoming dependent on fiat currency was one of the dumbest things the boomer generation did to us.
They really loved giving as much power as possible to as few people as possible, for some reason.
Exactly.
I carry two pounds of gold nuggets in my ass. For emergencies.
fiat currency
You got that from a sovereign citizen weirdo, didn’t ya?
Common talking point among the crypto community.
I don’t think it was as direct of a choice as it was a slow sinking into inevitability.
And did any boomer really have a choice for Nixon to NOT close the gold window?
