I was just thinking in the back of my head about how cheap LEDs have made types of lighting that would’ve cost way too much (both to install, and in electricity usage) no longer stupidly expensive.
For example, I noticed on Amazon some cheap furniture that has LEDs/power outlets sort of integrated right into them. Looks pretty cyberpunk-ish to my eyes. And I know years ago that sort of thing would’ve been marked up to high heavens.
Fancy lighting in general has changed drastically in price/design.
So…what are some things, due to changes in demand or changes in tech or changes in anything…that would’ve been really expensive back in the day, but which no longer seem to be, making them more frugal than they used to be?
International phone calls. Actually long distance domestic phone calls too.
In the pre- cellphone era, you would pay for telephone calls by the minute, and you would be charged a different rate if you called someone who lived out of your area. Like, a different rate per minute to talk to them? (I’m an Elder Millenial, so I grew up hearing about this stuff but didn’t live with it in my adult life, I just vaguely remember the adult freak-outs about unsanctioned long distance calls…always due to the impending huge telephone bill you’d get for it.) My point being, companies like AT&T (Ma Bell) had an utter stranglehold on telecommunications and would make you pay out the nose to call someone out of your area in the same country, and international calls were even steeper.
This was an age where the telephone company monopoly was so bad that they were forcibly broken up into smaller companies by the government to force competition and a better market for consumers. (Imagine if, say, Amazon, was forcibly broken up into smaller companies by the government.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System
In the digital age, I can basically call someone in the next room as cheaply as I can call someone in Australia. (Speaking from a USA pov.) One of the few things that’s better in the 2020s is how easy/cheap it is to call people now. (And text, and email, etc.)
I grew up in that era. I’ll add that, the area code of your telephone number was dictated by where you lived. You could only make “free” calls (included in your monthly bill) to the same area code. Different area codes were considered long distance and incurred a per-minute additional charge. I had friends and relatives that lived an hour away, but calling them was considered “long distance”. Given the price of gas at the time, it could be cheaper to drive to them to have a long conversation.
Another “world” we no longer have is the age of “collect call” and “calling cards”. Collect calls meant you were calling someone, but they accept paying the charges. This was often used if you had to call someone from a payphone and didn’t have money. Or, you had to call your parents long distance from your friend’s phone and didn’t want to charge it to them.
Then there’s the “calling card”. These allowed you to pre-pay for calls. You used to be able to buy a card at gas stations, drug stores, etc. that had prepaid domestic and long distance minutes on it. You’d call the number on the card first, enter the card info, then enter the telephone number you were calling. When you ran out of minutes, it would just hang up. Sometimes a voice would come onto the line and warn you that your time was almost up.
House phones were a great source of entertainment in the 80s. If you dialed zero, you were connected with a live operator you could prank. There was no caller id, so just dialing random numbers to prank was fun. Always in the same area code though. Otherwise your parents would get a charge on the bill at the end of the month and you’d be toast.
If it’s okay to go waaaaay back: salt. It’s always mind-blowing to me that people all over europe during the medieval age or even before that couldn’t season anything with salt cause it often was as expensive as gold itself. If I imagine those huge amounts of salt if you wanna pickle some meat or fish. Today salt costs nearly nothing, nearly everybody can afford it and it’s so basic that some even don’t consider it “seasoning” at all.
I imagine those beside the ocean must have figured out what happens when boiling sea water. But I guess it was scaling it that was an issue?
Tons of English phrases and words have salty origins, like salary.
Yeah, the scaling and transportation. If you wanted salt near the alps it was expensive as hell and mostly the salt came from mines, but that was a very difficult task.
Salary comes from salty? Like in a good way? I know an old “word” for salt in German is “weißes Gold” (white gold).
Sal is latin (and also French to this day) for salt. Salary referred originally to the amount of salt you received as payment.
I always used to figure a decent desktop computer would cost me between $2k and $3k. That’s going back to the early 90s. But even though the value of a dollar has plummeted since then, you can get a decent desktop for significantly less, maybe half.
I was able to build a desktop capable of 4k60 for around $1500, and I overbuilt in places. You can definitely do okay at $1000 or less if you’re aiming for lower resolutions these days.
Yep, for sure. And you can get a serviceable system for closer to $500, though you aren’t going to pay high end games.
Where do you source cheap parts? Maybe its a Canada thing, but things are still not cheap in my experience
TVs are very cheap now. The 40" Samsung LCD in my basement cost $1,200 fifteen years ago. It will soon be replaced by a 43" Samsung 4K TV that costs under $300.
DVD players used to cost $500+ and are now practically free.
I pay $15/month for xbox game pass and have access to hundreds of games. I don’t own them but I can if I want to.
I’ve noticed how cheap TVs are. I was thinking of getting one for like the first time in decades and I got sort of reverse sticker shock at how much screen you can get for so cheap a price.
Hand in hand with that, there’s a lot more marketing gobbledy-gook out there trying to upsell schmucks on features that are only marginally better, probably because basic large TVs are so cheap now. So they try hard to get people to upgrade more frequently than needed, or to get features that probably won’t make one iota of a difference in the viewing experience, just to sell more units/pricier units.
Our first colour tv cost about 3 months of my dad’s salary in the early 1970s. And the Siemens mainframe computer in the company he worked for was tens of thousands (which was more than a year’s worth of the average salary). Rent. Every month. It had less computing power than my smartphone.
If you want to go way back, books were a huge investment. Before the printing press, each one was hand copied, which took countless hours for each one. Like, one book could be comparable in to the cost of a house.