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
@retailfuturist
