Carpe Diem: Christmas Shopping for a TV: 1958 vs. 2009
In 1958, American holiday shoppers paid $269.95 for Sears’ “best 24-inch console TV” in its Christmas catalog (see photo above on left), or it would have taken 136.34 hours of work at the average manufacturing hourly wage then of $1.98 to earn enough income (ignoring taxes) to purchase the TV.
Today you can purchase a Sansui 26-inch widescreen LCD high-definition TV (see picture on right) on the Sears website for about $350 (or chose from the several hundred other TVs available), which would be a “time cost” today of only 19.03 hours of work at today's average hourly wage of $18.39, and this represents an 86 percent reduction in the cost compared to the 1958 TV. …
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