BACK IN MY DAY

1975-2025: 50 YEARS OF INFLATION

We’ve all heard the yarns: ‘Back in my day we could have fish ’n chips, two pints of beer and a Mars bar and still get change from a pound.’ 

Annoying, but it’s true.

Most of us know that the official inflation figures are like a lot of statistics we receive from the government in that they’re largely made up. The ONS official ‘basket of goods’ swerves all over the place in order to make the figure seem more palatable. Thinking about it, this so called basket is more of a wonky shopping trolley that forces you down the wrong aisle. It’s supposed to include a selection of everyday goods to act as a yardstick as to how prices are shifting, but one of these ‘everyday’ products is actually a VR headset. I’m serious. Unsurprisingly, VR headsets are dropping in price so even though no one actually wants one at least they have a role in reducing the official inflation figure.

In the real world, where most of us tend to hang out, you don’t have to be a Bank of England economist, or even work in the complaints department of The Halifax, to know that your own personal inflation rate has skyrocketed in the last few years. Whether it’s baked beans, the gas bill, your home insurance, holiday flights or your road tax we are more than aware that the real rate of inflation is nearer to 36% rather than their perfectly gaslit, gerrymandered 3.6%

That’s why I thought it would be fun to go back in time fifty years and compare the prices of everyday items, in order to discover where we’re being ripped off, basically.

When I reference 1975 for some of you I may as well say 75BC as it probably sounds like ancient history and utterly irelevant. But for us oldies 1975 was the year of Jaws, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and David Bowie’s Young Americans as well as marking the end of the Vietnam war. Not a bad year.

The good news is that while inflation bumps along nudging the cost of living ever upwards at varying speeds, the difference between prices in 1975 compared to today is essentially 10x. How convenient is that? You just add a nought! (The official figure is 10.74 but let’s keep this simple). It’s so easy to do the comparison.

Let’s start with the products that have pretty much stayed on course, increasing in perfect harmony with the general cost of living, products we can trust not to rip us off, products that should get some sort of award, I reckon.

Fairy Liquid is a good example: 15p in 1975 and roughly £1.50 today. 

A bottle of decent whisky in 1975 was about £3.50, so £35 in today’s money is about right, even though more than £15 of that is tax.

And the TV licence fee has shifted in synchrony too, costing £18 in 1975 for a colour TV licence and £174.50 today. Perhaps most surprising, most of us were still watching in black and white back then.

Even wine, I was surprised to find, has stayed steady despite heavier taxes, with a bottle of decent red costing £1-1.50 in 1975 making today’s prices seem not unreasonable. However, before you rush to open a bottle in celebration it’s worth noting that on a £10 bottle of wine the tax take is £4.88.

And trusty old HP Sauce has gone from 20p to about £2 a bottle over the half century. What a trooper.

Perhaps most surprising of all is petrol. Back in ’75 it was 78p per gallon which equates to about 17p per litre. So in real terms petrol is actually cheaper today, shock horror.

Ripflation!

Then there are those everyday products which have smashed down the barriers of natural inflation, often with a sleight of hand and some clever marketing or rebranding. These are the brands that should carry a bright red RIPFLATION warning.

Andrex Toilet Tissue has shifted from 5p a roll to not far off £1 a roll. They will argue the quality and choice has increased, what with all that quilty nonsense, but their prices have doubled nonetheless.

Heinz Baked Beans is another ripflation enthusiast jumping almost 3x in real terms from 5p to £1.40 a can.

A Ford Cortina was near enough a thousand pounds in 1975. A Ford Focus today will cost you at least £30,000. That’s a threefold real terms increase. Mind you, the Focus probably doesn’t squeak around bends like its grandpa did.

The Mars bar is one of those great British barometers by which we often judge the cost of things. The problem is they’ve fiddled with it. Shrinkflation has whittled the 58 gram bar down to a skinny 51 grams. (I’m sure it was for our own good) and the cocoa solids have been reduced too. However, the price has gone from 7p in 1975 to £1 today. Of course, multipacks and offers can bring this price down but if most prices have increased by a factor of 10 since 1975, the Mars bar has increased by a factor of 16! Coca Cola is very similar with a shift from 7p to £1 which is a good 30% increase in real terms. 

A Night Out

A portion of fish and chips was 35p back in the good old days. That’s doubled in real terms. Ouch.

Meanwhile, the Big Mac which had just landed in the UK, was 45p, so it’s considerably cheaper at today’s price of (approximately) £3.

Fifty years ago a West End theatre ticket cost between £3-5 and it’s still possible to get a ticket for under £50. Just.

A cinema ticket was 60p in 1975, so today’s £6 seems pretty spot on.

An evening meal with wine would have cost between £2-3 per head in 1975, whereas today you’re looking at near enough £100 for dinner for two at a mid market Italian restaurant. Mamma Mia!

Aspiration-Inflation

Our aspirations have been particularly hard hit. A room at the Savoy could be had for a mere £20 per night back in ’75. Stay there tonight and you’ll be dropping the best part of a grand. That’s five times higher than average inflation! Wowsers.

Vogue magazine, on the other hand was 35p in the mid seventies. Today it’s still only £3.99

A knickerbocker glory at Fortnum’s Fountain Restaurant would have set you back a whopping 12.5p in 1975 believe it or not. Today it’ll cost you £16. That’s a percentage increase of 12,700%! Inflation like that sure keeps the riff-raff away. If a Mars bar had increased by the same rate it would be £8.90 today.

And for the record, a stainless steel Rolex Submariner would have set you back £200 in 1975 (£2k in today’s money). A new one will cost you the best part of £10k. I guess that’s either Ripflation or an excellent investment. Meanwhile, if you’d held onto your 1975 vintage Submariner it could well be worth £30k today.

Homeflation

It’s the big cost increases of simply having a home that’s really crushed our spending power. Average rents have gone from £28 per month to at least £2k for anything anywhere near London. Council tax, back then known as domestic rates, has risen from approximately £100 a year to £2280 on average! This reflects property prices with the cost of an average UK home soaring from £9000 to £220,000 in fifty years. Back when the water companies didn’t pump sewage into our rivers, water rates were just £15-20 a year. Today, on average, we’re being hit for at least £600-700 a year  but, in fairness, they do pay themselves generous bonuses from that.

Most shocking of all, most revealing perhaps, is the cost of a beer. A pint cost roughly 20-28p in 1975, with some parts of the country serving it for less than 20p a pint. This means that the ‘proper’ price for a pint of beer today should be somewhere around £2.50…not £7 ffs! No wonder our pubs are struggling. By comparison, the cost of a supermarket can of beer has gone from 15p to about £2, so it simply doesn’t make any sense. Unlike wine, beer has faced repeated and significant increases in excise duties well above inflation, and tax makes up a large share of the final price, especially in pubs. The UK’s tax regime has relentlessly bullied beer with escalators and above-inflation duty rises, deliberately driving up the cost for pubs and restaurants. Put simply, if you can still find a pint for a fiver, £1.50 of that is tax.

We’re clearly being disincentivised to frequent the pub. And if we lose our pubs, we lose our communities. End of.

Cheers!

A special thanks to Perplexity and Grok for much of the research.

Howard Saunders is a writer, speaker and the Retail Futurist

howard@22and5.com

theretailfuturist.com

@retailfuturist

  Howard Saunders   Jul 20, 2025   discount, Retail, sales, shopping, Uncategorized   Comments Off on BACK IN MY DAY   Read More

DYSTOPIA 2041

It was over Sunday lunch back in the winter of 2022 that we had the heated family argument over all this. Dad was on one of his ‘hell in a handcart rants’ and was convinced the government wanted complete control over every aspect of our lives and we should resist at every turn. What he failed to see was any of the positive side: the health benefits, the increased security and even our own longevity for that matter. No, he certainly wasn’t right about everything.

Take the ApMan system, for example. Yes, it tracks everywhere I go but it also nudges me to take more exercise or even drink more water. It lets me know when the air is safe and even recommends the safest route for a daytime breather. After ‘consumer traffic’ was banned in cities in 2030, carbon monoxide levels have thankfully plummeted, but levels of ozone and PM (particulate matter) can still be dangerously high, so it’s best to stay indoors, even for an amber warning. No need to take unnecessary risks.

Traffic levels are historically low but there are still plenty of autonomous trucks and cabs running around so the PSS (Pedestrian Signal System) keeps us safe. I seriously cannot imagine how treacherous the roads were back in the day when Dad used to drive around in his own car…and without any guidance control! Terrifying.

When occasionally we do venture out on foot it’s so much safer these days, even if you do get fifty quid knocked off your UBI for cutting the corner at a zebra crossing. You soon learn to stick to the allocated routes and zones.

PHOTOGRAPHY: JAN ENKELMANN

ApMan is indispensable, frankly. Obviously you need it to get into a bar, store or a gallery, but now that it’s linked to my personal genome it advises me on what’s best to eat, how much, and at what time of day. Following his advice also gives me a serious discount off my health insurance, so it really is a win win. Over indulge on anything and it will vibrate annoyingly for hours so there’s very little drunkenness anymore, at least not for the tracked and healthy. Pubs are more highly regulated than anywhere, so you’d be crazy to flout ApMan’s advice if you want to stay off the trouble maker list.

Restaurants are pretty strict too as they have to follow so much of the latest legislation, so it’s easier just to order from one of the dark kitchens. There’s so much more choice than in the restaurants anyway, and it’s a hell of a lot safer than mixing with everyone, that’s for sure. Every day there’s news of yet another outbreak in a bar or a brasserie that’s then forced to shut down for disinfection. And it often takes months for full Green Clearance.

I remember the local food markets we had around here until they were eventually banned for being the proven source of countless infections and viruses. No one wants to risk their health like that anymore. I think it was the long, hot summer of 2025 that the Hygiene Squad swooped in to close ours down. Quite an exciting day that was!

PHOTOGRAPHY: JAN ENKELMANN

London is so much cleaner and impressive looking than it was in Dad’s day. All the architecture is tastefully illuminated at night and the roads are so much quieter too, with PSS embedded into the pavements everywhere and distress buttons every few hundred metres or so. The heated underpasses do fill up with the homeless in the evenings, but above ground the city looks better than it’s ever looked, I imagine.

PHOTOGRAPHY: JAN ENKELMANN

I haven’t used the Tube in years but apparently it’s almost exactly as it was fifty years ago, complete with some of the (now protected) posters and ads for fast food and alcoholic drinks. Some E-friends of mine made a Youtube documentary about it not long ago. London’s Underground really is a piece of subterranean living history, shuttling cleaners and sanitary workers beneath the city right around the clock.

Back at home my children are pretty well balanced, all things considered. Their bi-monthly Social Wellness tests put them in the top 20%, even though they both spend most of the day in the Metaverse. They go to concerts there as well as educational classes and lectures in order to boost their home studies, so it isn’t all e-sports and shoot-em-ups. Sam’s actually got a paid job in there, managing some digital entrepreneur’s identity or something on an Ethereum retainer. It’s all a bit beyond me, to be honest.

So you see, what my father couldn’t understand was that giving up a bit of our independence would in return help make us so much safer, healthier and more financially secure than ever before. Dad might not agree but I believe that’s a price well worth paying.

I promise my next blog will be a tad more upbeat. Meanwhile please follow me on Twitter @retailfuturist for daily insights and wry retail based musings.

  Howard Saunders   Nov 15, 2021   advertising, city, discount, face recognition, Future, smartphone, technology, Uncategorized   Comments Off on DYSTOPIA 2041   Read More