The good ol’ days
September 25, 2007
I ran across this site last night(via here and here). It is a Flickr collection of old Sears Chistmas catalogs (among other things) from the 1940s through the 1980s, scanned page by page. A virtual memory lane of all the old toys you ever thought you wanted for Christmas. Too much fun. I can waste hours doing this kind of shit.
One thing I ran across during my time wasting was in the electronics section from the 1979 catalog(click to enlarge):
Damn! $339.95 for a 19″ color TV? I haven’t bought a TV in a while so I checked out Walmart’s wares. They have one for sale on their website for $119.96. Considering that the median income in 1979 was $16,461, that was one expensive TV. If you earned the median income, it would have taken you over a week’s worth of work to buy that TV in 1979. It would take a little more than 5 hours (if my math is correct) today. To put it another way, if the price of TVs had kept up with inflation, that $340, 19″ color TV would cost $1,015 today. Yikes!
September 25, 2007 at 7:34 am
That fits in with the HDTVs that are being sold. Is anyone really drooling over the couple hundred dollar set at Wal-Mart? At the time of the ad, was anyone drooling over the 10 inch black and white sold at Pryor’s TV and Radio Store for what, fifty?
I like seeing old computer ads. Whooo. Windows has a clock and calculator now. How exciting! Or how about when Apple’s computers were just as ugly as PCs? Or when 256Mb was the size of the hard disk drive rather than a stick of memory?
September 25, 2007 at 8:23 am
This was the low end version of color TVs for Sears, not something anyone would drool over.
September 25, 2007 at 12:45 pm
TV Schmee Vee. What about mah Eazy-Bake Oven!?!