BLS inflation calculator: Internet Convenience or Enabler of Madness ?

 The Bureau of Labor Statistics operates a nice web page where a price and date of a historical item can be entered and the inflated price in today's dollars is revealed.  This makes for stunning reading as far as classic ham gear is concerned.  

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl 

The most extreme example of this for ham radio is the Hallicrafters FPM-200 transceiver, per the 1963 Allied catalog on the World Radio History site:

it sold for $2650, plugging that into the BLS calculator:

which is $23,910 in December 2021  dollars !  As you might imagine it's a rare rig.  A teen making $1.15 per hour minimum wage in 1963 would have to work well over a year (2304 hours) to buy one and that doesn't include shipping !

Where do I use the BLS inflation calculator the most ?  on Ebay for bidding on items from my past that I can't really justify other than "I want one"

An example was this Lionel 3270 Communications Lab that I was gifted for Christmas probably in 1966, here is the blurb in the 1966 Sears Christmas Wishbook from archive.org:

I don't remember what happened to mine but I regularly look for one on ebay.  $7.66 for the toy in 1966 inflates to:

$64.91 in 2021.  just to make sure that I'm not underbidding, 75 cents shipping inflates to:

$6.36.  Total of toy plus shipping is $71.27.  Now since the ebay item isn't even close to new maybe some kind of derating factor is needed ?  say 50% ?  so bid $35.64 total .

Luckily I did NOT win the auction :)  But my madness was aided by the BLS calculator.  Someone else just had to have it.

The internet can be a dangerous place.

 Best Regards,

Chuck, WB9KZY

http://wb9kzy/ham.htm