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