You want fries with that?

While dining in elegance the other evening at our neighborhood Whataburger, or “Burgers and Fries” as Luke named it, we overheard a conversation between a drive-thru customer and one of the order-takers. The customer apparently had $1.80 to their name and was asking what they could purchase for fine dining for that amount. The clerk was reading off the items on the board that cost less than that – including the Whataburger Junior and Justaburger, fried apple pies and all the fries and drinks.

Had it been me, I would have gone to the convenience store up on the corner and purchased a buck-eighty’s worth of Slim-Jims. It wouldn’t be particularly nourishing, but you could gnaw on them for a long, long time, perhaps forgetting how broke you were.

Mom reminded me of the days when we would look for loose change in the couch cushions to come up with $2.50. If we had that much we could feed the entire family at McDonald's; 2 burgers each for Mom and Dad, one each for the kids and share some French fries and Cokes. When we first discovered McDonald's (here in Austin, on the drive from Abilene to the coast) hamburgers were 15 cents each and cokes and fries were only 10 cents each and there was no dining in. They were still changing the sign out front to tell you how many million they had sold. By the time we moved to Austin the burgers were up to 19 cents. By the late ‘70s prices had soared to 38 cents per burger!

That brought to mind the Jamaica Inn – a seafood restaurant in Abilene that we really loved. Sunday lunch cost $5 (you kids ate off our plates). We finally decided that $5 a week was an outrageous amount for us to be spending on our Sunday lunch and we quit going regularly. What were we thinking?

Interestingly, if you apply the Consumer Price Index to that $2.50, that is the equivalent of $13.42 today; $5 is equivalent to $26.84. Hmm. That’s about what we pay for burgers or a Sunday lunch today. I guess the only difference is that we don’t dig in the couch for change now – we just whip out the credit card. I miss the good old days.