Idle Ramblings

I don't remember how it came up but Wednesday night at training Stu mentioned that he remembered milk being 4 cents a bottle. This is when milk came in 1 pint glass bottles, 1 pint being 600 ml, and the bottles had foil on the top. There used to be a great big layer of cream on the top since we didn't get the homogenised variety. I never got any of the cream however, since I would go to the fridge and every single one of the 4 or 5 bottles of milk in there had been opened and a 'mouse' had sucked the cream off already. That mouse being my brother of course.

Anyhow, Denise also remembered milk being 4 cents a pint and her father earning around $6000 a year. This all got me to thinking (always dangerous), do we complain about milk being so expensive now because it really is or is it just inflation in action? The price of milk varies depending where you go but Countdown sells 2L for 3.39. So I did some mental calculations and was left gasping - even taking inflation into account, milk is around 3 times more expensive now than it was in 1975.

But maybe Denise's dad was a CEO earning mega. Time for Dr Google. Please bear in mind that this isn't an academic article - it isn't the time or place, just a thought-provoking 'thingy' on the price of milk so my only reference was www.stats.govt.nz/infoshare (since you asked!). Numbers are averages not medians and no account has been made for that almost certainly there are more women in the workforce today than there were in 1975 which will skew income data. But all that (and more) aside.....

In 1975 the average weekly wage was $95. By the way, Stats NZ says that $95 in 1975 equates to around $850 in 2012. Let's call $95, $2.88 per hour, just for the sake of argument.

In 2012 that average weekly wage was $860 (roughly). Let's call $860, $21.50 per hour. It doesn't matter if it's before or after tax since we are treating both 1975 and 2012 the same.  Accountants may disagree with me on that, I'm not an accountant as you know.

How much milk could we get for our money? In 1975, $2.88 would have bought us 43L of milk. In other words you could buy 43L of milk for every 1 hour worked. Sounds pretty good. In 2012 $21.50 buys around 13L of milk, so 13L for every hour worked. Turns out my mental arithmetic wasn't far off the mark. Milk is roughly 3 to 3.5 times more expensive than it was 40 years ago.