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
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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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.
The price of specific items has doubled
Rent, which has outpaced inflation had a national average of $1149 in 2019 and was $1650 in 2025 in order for average rent to have doubled you have to go all the way back to 2007ish
Instead of tracking a burrito, track how much 1lb of chicken cost or bananas or broccoli
No, instead let's base our economic reality on pure vibes and the most extreme, specific examples we can personally remember 🙄
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Looks like you have to go back to 1979 for it to be true
So they were off by a factor of 2.35 (47 years is 2.35x 20 years)
That's just as wrong as OP. You need to use the Subway metric.
Five Dollar Footlongs ended a decade ago. Now they're 11-17$.
Now they advertise $5 shorties and the millennial in me has to do a doubletake of incredulity
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.
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.
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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.
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..
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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...
🤷
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!
I think we already all smoke gasoline anyways, it's called exhaust.. ☹️
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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 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. ☹️
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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.
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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 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
They introduced the Sacagawea dollar coins a while back with the expectations that people would use them for daily transactions. After an initial brief interest, they quickly fell off. Turns out that people in the US don't really care to use coins, and used the paper $1 bills at every opportunity.
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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.
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I use 1930 as the base year. So the $20 USD bill is actually the new $1 bill.
Not totally, but it depends, inflation doesn't happen equally between goods, but in a general sense thats a bit high.
For our current level of inflation we should have dimes (the new penny), 50 cent pieces (instead of quarter), and coins for $1, $2, and $5. Then in bills we should have $10, $20, $50, $100, $500, and $1000.
For cocaine, yes
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