Are you serious? Twenty-five cents for a Tootsie Pop? Just one? I was shocked and offended as I looked at the small container on the counter at the Caterpillar Café that held a dozen or so of the almost legendary and revered Tootsie Pop lollipops.
I have known and eaten those treats — on occasion — ever since the middle of the last century, when they sure weren't a quarter of a dollar! No, I paid a nickel for two. Really! Yes, a nickel had real buying power, and even a single penny could buy a piece of bubble gum. You can understand my shock at seeing that twenty-first-century twenty-five-cent price tag for a single Tootsie Pop.
While I felt a little like making a fuss and accusing the barista of ripping us all off, I kept my cool and took my coffee to a table, where I sipped and mused about the price of those suckers. My father, born in 1920, used to exclaim about the price of a hamburger and a milkshake or the price and the size of a Milky Way candy bar. When this happened, I’d just roll my eyes, thinking, There he goes again.
But I think he loved showing off how much the world had changed in his lifetime, giving me a small lesson in how my world would undoubtedly change, too. So, while staring at my coffee, I realized soon enough that since the mid-1950s, there has been a lot of inflation. (You can calculate that here: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl).
A nickel in 1950 is equivalent to sixty-eight cents today! Now, that nickel bought two Tootsie Pops, so the price of just one is equivalent to about 34 cents today. Wait a minute… I guess the twenty-five-cent price on the counter was actually a bargain, even if it didn’t look like one.
The problem, of course, is that once you remember buying two for a nickel, it's pretty hard to enjoy one that costs 25 cents. Oh, and the pinball machines they have at the café are $1 for one game! Compare that to the ten cents I paid when I was a kid, when it was still a little risky to be seen playing pinball at the local bowling alley. If she could read my mind, I can imagine the Caterpillar cashier rolling her eyes, smiling, and thinking, What a cute elderly fellow.
Gene Weisskopf grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area where he went to his first anti-war rally at Kezar Stadium. His professional life included being a contractor building additions and remodeling homes, writing software for businesses, writing popular-press computer books, and working with the B Reactor Museum Association to ensure that Hanford's B Reactor was preserved and opened to the public.
