Just a reminder that the comm has moved to !historyphotos@piefed.social
They literally had this but fucked up the climate, future investions, infrastructure and pensions anyways
They got rich by doing all that. Well their kids.
Does everyone on lemmy just equate “old” with “Boomer”?
Boomers were the people who were born after 1945, during the baby boom after the second World War. The people in this picture were, if they had kids born after 1945, the parents of boomers.
Silent generation
Or forgotten generation.
But also, yea let’s not forget it really came down to who voted for Reagan. I’m a little tired of the boomer hate because it overlooks some of the okay boomers, and yes, equates “old” with “selfish asshole”.
Hot take, old is already equated with asshole. The current ruling class in the United states is predominantly ancient and white. The gerontocracy is the reason we are in this shitstorm. People have already been hating white people for decades, and ageism has been around since at least I was a kid.
My mom is an ‘okay’ boomer. My point stands.
The current ancient ruling class you’re talking about are literally boomers.
It’s not the age, it’s the class.
The wealthy, both young and old, are the ones giving over the rest of us.
Generational division is just a distraction from the real culprits
Right, but it was the boomers that did the fucking up, no?
Yeah, like their previous generation didn’t do anything… Remember the nazis? Remember Stalin? Remember the empire of the rising sun? I mean, boomers fucked up the environment and economy for our generation. The generation before them killed literally millions in death camps all around the world, during 2 world wars with the most horrible war crimes and with 2 nukes. It’s a matter of perspective.
Have we stopped talking about the photo and subsequent comment chain?
No one said anything about boomers?
Lol, this is like the people who get themselves worked up because everything is “woke”… when no one but them mentioned it.
how was this possible? was there a deflation?
or was it the specificity of the product sugar that was made so expensive due to wartime restrictions on maritime trade?The sign says “O.P.A. Ceiling Prices,” so WWII-era price controls were probably the subject.
Beltalowda na animals!
sasa ke
Damn i wish i was witty enough to remember belter dialect. I can read it just fine but using it is beyond me.
sta calm, kopeng
The answer is in the photo (well the reason I guess)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Price_Administration
i was so busy looking at the prices that my adhd brain didn’t register the opa part! thanks for the explanation
In addition to the WWII rations and OPA stuff that others have mentioned, there was a fair amount of general deflationary pressure during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
I haven’t looked at what happened to sugar specifically.
Later on, after the Cuban Revolution I know we subsidized sugar partly out of spite for Cuba. That would not be at play here though.
I wonder why, its not like any major events happened around 1918 and 1945
it only took a market crash and two world wars.
Today that list would be 16 euros or something.
Yeah you’re close. Ball park for Lidl where I do most of my shopping:
5lbs of sugar €5
Bread €1
2 quarts of milk €2.50
6 oranges €2.50
Oatmeal €1.80
Coffee €4
In the US bread is 3 even at aldi, 5 at big box stores at label.
What do you mean by “bread”? Is it completely white, or does it contain a lot of sugar? The bread I know in the US contains zero nutritional value.
I am talking about the mid grade bread like 12 grain that I buy. The lower shelf is like Wonder Bread that is worthless where you could squeeze the entire loaf down to an inch. As to the mid-grade bread like the 12 grain or the whole wheat or other variants there is some nutritional value but it is also chock full of sugar and salt to disguise substandard ingredients and just to indulge our corrupted palettes.
Perversely most of the top shelf bread that is usually made by local bakeries is almost all white bread from refined grains. Although it may be the case that how the grain is grown leads to higher amounts of pesticides and toxic chemicals not removing the outer part of the grain but I don’t know on that specifically.
Inch?
Agricultural and food regulations in the US are terrible. What is considered food-safe in the US is considered toxic here.
The only healthy bread is whole wheats. It’s the only bread containing fibers. I just bake my own, with a bread baking machine. That way I can control the amount of sugar (none) and salt in it (bare minimum) and don’t use preservants. Supermarket whole wheats bread here contains a maximum of only 20% whole wheats. Mine 50% (more makes it become a brick).
That’s crazy money. Name brand bread in a normal supermarket is around 3 USD here and I resent paying it.
Honestly I’d be buying a bread machine at those prices but we’ve a lot in the house so go through a lot of bread for school lunches etc.
Comparatively your sugar prices are nuts to me as an aussie, i get it for like a buck a kilo.
Holy fuckballs! How in the name is Jesus is anyone making money on that?
Actually, on further reflection and a check in my cupboard, I am a donkey. It’s just over a euro a kilo here. I had it in my head that the bags were half kilos.
That’s still nearly half the price compared to here and I thought it was stupid cheap already.
We have a lot of cane and sell it like crazy overseas
My price is for like 12 grain type of bread, not the Wonder Bread which is a little cheaper, the bottom shelf bread might be $250 to $3 at a big box store if not on sale, the better factory stuff is like four or five.
I was baking bread for a couple of years not even because of price specifically but because this factory bread is kind of garbage.
I hardly eat bread anymore or I still would. I cut out all added sugar as well. Almost any kind of processed food. Now if I eat something like factory bread it is a shock to my taste buds tasting all of the sugar and salt they load it up with.
Yeah, American bread shocked me when I got there the first time. Sugar in bread is wild to me. WILD!!! I was genuinely, deeply shocked at sweet bread.
The stuff you get for a euro here is a basic white sliced pan (no sugar). It’s…fine. The kids like it for toast and sandwiches and I’m not averse to it. They have multigrain or freshly baked (that day) brown soda bread and a slicing machine which would be my preference and that is around the $3 / €2.50 mark but I can’t justify buying it just for myself. Nothing costs anywhere remotely near $5.
I recall the US being cheaper for groceries and food in general when I was living there but that was only for 4 months in the late 90’s. I wonder if you’ve been harder hit by inflation in the intervening years than we have in Europe.
edit: I was curious so went off to look. The answer is yes. For groceries you guys have had higher inflation since I was there (roughly +110% versus roughly +70% in the EU). Interesting stuff.
Inflation had ticked up considerably by 2020, 2021 it just started rising and never stopped.
Especially beef at the moment. But in a year 2003 prices seemed about half of what they are now.
Vegetables and produce are probably twice what they were just in 2020, salad dressing was 88 cents at Aldi and now is like $2.
I get auntie mills carb smart bread and checked, it doesn’t have any perceptible amount of sugar in it. I didn’t know sugar was common in bread in the US.
Man I wish i lived back in 1940 times and my husband beat me for having polio
And back then your therapist was also your bartender.
If you were lucky…
So free therapy?
As long as you’re paying for the tips and drinking constantly…
Can we get something like that again, please?
BTW in 1918 1.34$ was around 31 bucks today, and in 1945 it was around 24.5 or so.
To be clear, you’re requesting a great depression?
Can we just have the bit where speculators got wiped out?
Let’s have more purchasing power WITHOUT a depression! BTW 1945 was just when WW2 was going to end, and during WW2 the US and Canadian economies were booming because they were far away from the fighting and everyone who wasn’t fighting could get a job helping those that did. So people were working.
so it’s 1/2 milk then?
Or how I like to call it, 1+2 milk
Unfortunately this comes about from a depression which is when most folks have zero of close enough to it to be zero. then suddenly bread goes for a few cents because most people cannot get enough cents together to buy bread and those with money don’t need anymore bread they have plenty.
It comes from price ceilings. When there’s no capitalist making money for doing nothing, and their buddies in overplayed management positions making money doing almost nothing, you can produce sugar real cheap.
pretty sure there were plenty of owners still making money for nothing during the depression. They jumped out of windows because. OMG! LESS MONIES!!!
Wasn’t that the time when money was based on precious shiny metals instead of imaginary garbage and farts?
Kinda, but not for domestic transactions.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2017/november/why-us-no-longer-follows-gold-standard
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