Prices the year you were born
Pick a year from 1980 to 2025 to see what fifteen everyday U.S. items cost then, what they cost now, and how many minutes of work each took at the average hourly wage. A pound of coffee cost $3.14 in 1980, about 28 minutes of work.
Your year
Every year
Why minutes of work
A price from 1985 next to a price from today mostly tells you that the dollar shrank. Dividing each price by that year's average hourly wage puts both in the same unit: how long you had to work to buy it. By that measure most groceries got cheaper, and a few, eggs and beef among them, did not.
Prices are U.S. city averages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The wage is the BLS average for production and nonsupervisory employees, who are about four in five private sector workers. To play with the same numbers, try Price Year. The short version is in what groceries cost the year you were born.