Fred Pohl on the Good Old Days
$0.39 in 1937 had about the same buying power as $6.02 in 2010. SWMBO informs me you can buy a half-pound of ground round steak for about $2.00. Meat has gotten more sanitary and less expensive since 1937.
To paraphrase the late, great Minnie Pearl: "I'd like to think that Fred just isn't himself today. But I'm afraid he is."
When I was ten years old, my mother used to have me skate down to the butchers’ on Flatbush Avenue and, for 39 cents, get half a pound of ground round steak and “watch him grind it.”
Then time passed. We got all the advantages of modern technology as they came along. By now, the butchers’ was in the local supermarket and the “ground round” was in pre-measured and plastic-wrapped packages, the healthiest-looking, reddest already ground meat you ever saw, and apart from the odd case of staph or Escherichia coli now and then, everything was just as modern and as sanitary as it could be, and of course it wasn’t 39 cents any more, either.
$0.39 in 1937 had about the same buying power as $6.02 in 2010. SWMBO informs me you can buy a half-pound of ground round steak for about $2.00. Meat has gotten more sanitary and less expensive since 1937.
To paraphrase the late, great Minnie Pearl: "I'd like to think that Fred just isn't himself today. But I'm afraid he is."
