I was having lunch with a friend last week, and he commented on the prices at the local chain restaurant. Everything you could order came out to about $13 or $15 for a breakfast plate or a sandwich and side. I know, of course, because I remember when taking the family out for a meal came to $40 instead of $80, and that was just a couple of years ago. He has a larger family and has to be more frugal, so he probably doesn’t eat out that often. Neither do we these days, it seems; when reconciling accounts recently, I only came across two restaurant receipts. Time was that we accrued a stack of them in the month, with a couple of trips to fast food places and a couple of sit-down restaurant trips. But even McDonalds is $15 a person these days, so, nah.
But: I ordered a sandwich and a salad, and the salad came with a sliced hard-boiled egg. For free. It was only a couple of years ago when eggs were $5 a dozen, and this very restaurant had an egg surcharge. But here I got one, for free. And I remember a time, a long time ago, when you could have dinner at this restaurant–after the installation service for a pastor friend, we had dinner here, and I remember being upset that my then-young son put my suit at risk of a stain. Perhaps even the son who later purloined that very suit. But after the restaurant reopened in 2020, it only had breakfast and lunch hours, and the menu is reduced accordingly. But I remember.
Since we have an election coming up, news outlets are thumping the gas prices thing. They are up, but some of us remember other times when they were high. Apparently, I posted on Facebook about a near $50 fill-up, and my ha’brother posted a photo of the gas pump of a recent filling in Wisconsin:
That’s $3.96 gas fourteen years ago, pre-inflation, pre-$15 minimum wage. A commenter at Founding Questions yesterday, reminiscing about the 1990s, pegs gas prices in 1995 at $1.20 a gallon when the minimum wage was $4.25 an hour. I haven’t delved into official statistics, but that seems to track with what I remember, and note that the price of gas then was around 1/4 minimum wage. Kind of like today.
But memory, and perspective, won’t get people wee-weed up. I used that expression the other day with my beautiful wife, and she said she had never heard it.
