We're in a recession and Argos have put their prices up?!!

PasturesNew

I remember my first mono cassette player with radio. It was about 1975, cost me £75. It was about the cheapest mono cassette player with radio that could be bought at the time. It meant I could record from the radio (Top 20) onto tapes. Cheap tapes cost 33p each.

When you compare those prices to today, £75 would have taken me nearly a month to save up for it (84p per hour I was on - income tax was probably 25-33%).

Would anybody now take an entire month's takehome pay to buy a mono cassette recorder? No. Now you could pick up the modern equivalent for probably 3 hours' pay. Would an audio tape cost half an hour's pay, say £2.60-2.70 based on minimum wage)? No.

penguine

More price increases, not just Argos -- just noticed a little desk I purchased for my daughter from a mail-order catalogue has gone up by £20 since I bought it in November. (It's imported from Taiwan.)

welshmoneylover

I had a flick through the new catalogue and noticed their prices had shot up a lot.

Still won't shop there though,

Sue

boyse7en

PasturesNew wrote: »

I remember my first mono cassette player with radio. It was about 1975, cost me £75. It was about the cheapest mono cassette player with radio that could be bought at the time. It meant I could record from the radio (Top 20) onto tapes. Cheap tapes cost 33p each.

When you compare those prices to today, £75 would have taken me nearly a month to save up for it (84p per hour I was on - income tax was probably 25-33%).

Would anybody now take an entire month's takehome pay to buy a mono cassette recorder? No. Now you could pick up the modern equivalent for probably 3 hours' pay. Would an audio tape cost half an hour's pay, say £2.60-2.70 based on minimum wage)? No.

That's a bit of a red herring as a product, as in 1975 cassettes would have been brand-new technology. Early adopters always pay through the nose for new tech: Blu-ray players were over £1000 a few years ago, and Plasma screens were £3-4000.
I expect within a coupe of years, tape players were much cheaper in comparison to hourly rates.

neverdespairgirl

I was given a tape player / radio set when I was 10, in 1988. Still got it, still works perfectly.

penguine

I bought a tape-to-tape player/radio for about $100 in the January sales in 1991. It has a handy timer feature that enables me to record radio programmes when I'm not home. Still works great (had to pay about £30 for a step-down converter when I moved to the UK though).