Comment on The $20 USD bill is the new 5$ bill

butwhyishischinabook@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• Grail@multiverse.soulism.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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. The comparison is flawed.

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  • Scubus@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • BussyCat@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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

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      • butwhyishischinabook@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        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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    • booly@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Obviously depends on the specific item.

      Here’s the national averages for:

      Flour

      Milk

      Boneless chicken breast

      Or an entire table of food items they’ve been tracking monthly prices on for years.

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• Vince@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Looks like you have to go back to 1979 for it to be true

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  • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    So they were off by a factor of 2.35 (47 years is 2.35x 20 years)

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• surewhynotlem@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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$.

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  • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Now they advertise $5 shorties and the millennial in me has to do a doubletake of incredulity

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  • booly@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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• wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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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  • butwhyishischinabook@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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 inacceptably 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.

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    • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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…

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      • butwhyishischinabook@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        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.

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