At a recent Halloween party in my condo building, an older neighbor recalled how relieved she was when her young son left diapers in the rear-view mirror in the early 1970s. “I felt rich,” the woman said. Back then diapers were an expense of substance, according to my neighbor a $10/week expense. Notable about this woman is that she was hardly poor. Her husband was an executive at International Paper at the time, they lived outside of New York in well-to-do Westchester County, but $10 was a lot back then.
Fast forward to the present and diapers are much cheaper in a relative sense. So much is. While the first ball-point pens cost roughly $15 each when introduced, nowadays consumers can buy a box of sixty Paper Mate 2.0 pens, the best ball points in the world according to yours truly, for $7 on Amazon. Considering wireless phones, they were so rare in the ‘80s that seeing someone with one was cause for stopping to stare in awe; by the ‘90s the use of these only-for-the-rich gadgets was parodied in movies like Clueless. Movies are escapism for many, and it was escapist for the movie-going public to see how kids in Beverly Hills lived. They had mobile phones that they actually talked on…Roaming charges? That was a worry for those not from Beverly Hills, assuming they had phones at all. Most didn't.
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