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.
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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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.
Its still a buck fifty for a hotdog and soda at Costco.
Heart disease is cheap to get but expensive to fix.
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!
For cocaine, yes
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
I want 20 dollar coins too. If you take inflation from early 1800s to now the dollar coin would be worth more.
Someone could probably successfully pitch this to Trump with. "We waste so much money on printing bills, coins last forever" "paper money is so dirty" "We could shut down the Denver mint once we have enough coins made" "They will all be plated in gold type material" "we will put your face on the 20 coin, everybody will see your face forever everyday"
... On second thought maybe don't pitch it to him
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.
I used them. We had a drink dispenser on a college campus that would dispense Sacagawea coins as change and I would feed spare change and get my dollars back and save them until I had enough to make a coin purse like a pirate and go spend them at the bar.
We ditched the penny in Canada years ago. Nickels and dimes are near useless
The U.S. also stopped minting pennies last year.
I use 1930 as the base year. So the $20 USD bill is actually the new $1 bill.
Yeah except that's not even close to true. $5 in December 2015 is worth $6.85 in December 2025 (the most recent data available).
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=5&year1=201512&year2=202512
That's just as wrong as OP. You need to use the Subway metric.
Five Dollar Footlongs ended a decade ago. Now they're 11-17$.
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
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 🙄
It's the lemmy way. How else will people grab attention?
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.
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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)
$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
These feel kinda strange. How do they get calculated? Like while a dollar is less over time yes how well does it take into account that everything has just gotten better at extranting wealth?
How do they get calculated?
The CPI consists of a family of indexes that measure price change experienced by urban consumers. Specifically, the CPI measures the average change in price over time of a market basket of consumer goods and services. The market basket includes everything from food items to automobiles to rent. The CPI market basket is developed from detailed expenditure information provided by families and individuals on what they actually bought. There is a time lag between the expenditure survey and its use in the CPI. For example, CPI data in 2023 was based on data collected from the Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CE) for 2021. That year, over 20,000 consumer units from around the country provided information each quarter on their spending habits in the interview survey. To collect information on frequently purchased items, such as food and personal care products, approximately another 12,000 consumer units kept diaries listing all items they bought during a 2-week period that year. This expenditure information from weekly diaries and quarterly interviews determines the relative importance, or weight, of the item categories in the CPI index structure.
The CPI represents all goods and services purchased for consumption by the reference population (U or W). BLS has classified all expenditure items into more than 200 categories, arranged into eight major groups (food and beverages, housing, apparel, transportation, medical care, recreation, education and communication, and other goods and services). Included within these major groups are various government-charged user fees, such as water and sewerage charges, auto registration fees, and vehicle tolls.
If you want to see the current makeup of the basket of goods whose prices are tracked, and their weights in the index, here is Table 1 of the most recent report. And if you want to follow the price of a specific category over time, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis keeps a really helpful interactive chart service for almost every public economic stat. Here is Table 1 of the CPI report.
It's a lot of data collection on prices across a lot of transactions, and a lot of list prices, and a lot of locked in contract prices, to determine how much people are spending on different types of things, whether the quality of those things is changing over time, and what percentage of a typical household income gets spent on those types of things.
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