Purchasing power of coins when they were minted? ( what was the )

Thanks, the silver center cent was about the same time as the 1797 tuppence you mentioned (we don't have tuppence here in the colonies, but we do have tupperware).

 

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When I was young I couldnt buy a pack of gum for a nickel. It always costs a buck for me. Gosh things are overpriced these days.

 

Groucho Marx...I love this man

The nickel today is not what it was fifteen years ago. Do you know what this country needs today?…A seven-cent nickel. Yessiree, we’ve been using the five-cent nickel in this country since 1492. Now that’s pretty near a hundred years’ daylight saving. Now, why not give the seven-cent nickel a chance? If that works out, next year we could have an eight-cent nickel. Think what that would mean. You could go to a newsstand, buy a three-cent newspaper and get the same nickel back again. One nickel carefully used would last a family a lifetime! (from Filmsite.org)

 

Cool question, but the products are very different.

no gasoline or electronics in 1812 for example.

 

I am pleased that the topic got some thought. I still wonder in 1812 how much a loaf of bread cost in copper cents or maybe a head of cabbage or a fish. Any of those were probably less than a dime.

 

A better question is what was the cost of a sack of flour. Most people baked their own bread, farmed, hunted, and bartered. Here's an article on the cost of things begining in 1776.

http://247wallst.com/2010/09/16/the-history-of-what-things-cost-in-america-1776-to-today/

 

The amount of copper in a penny was actually a little less than a cent's worth, that was the senoriage the mint got to keep. As to Doug's point about metal prices changing, you can see this in the weight of the early cent drop as the real price of copper rose. So 1793/94 are 208 grains, lowered to 168 grains in 1795.

How much a penny would buy is tough because as other have pointed out every day items were more expensive in real terms than they are today and doing an inflation calculator does not take this into account. Just for comparison, the early mint workers, the laborers back in the late 1790's made around $1 a day.

I have also read a couple accounts indicating that large cents, and to a much larger degree half cents, did not really circulate, and never circulated outside of the northeast. As a quick example, the largest half cent mintage is 1804 with 1.5 million minted (with most other years around 300,000) for a total population of 5.5 million people. A quick look at 2010 cent mintage runs at 5 billion coins for 315 million people. So in the best year of half cent mintage they had .3 half cent per person (more normal year would be .05 half cents minted per person) while in 2010 we have 15 cents per year per person minted.

Mint reports also indicate that the silver and gold coinage only circulated in an area close to the mint. At this time, foreign coinage made up the majority of small change.

In terms of what things cost back in the 1790, this is the mint directors expense book, you can see what he bought and how much it cost. Love this 'June 13, 1793 - Warrant in favor of Henry Voigt, 30 gals. spirits bought of John Wilson $30.00'. This is a better way to view the real cost of things back then, one day of labor, at $1 a day, would buy 1 gallon of spirits. One day of labor today actually buys around the same amount, 8 hours at $8 per hour is $64, with two 1.75 litter bottles being about a gallon, although the working conditions will be much better.

http://www.coinfacts.com/mint_history/mint_history_1793/mint_records_1793.htm

 

Love threads like these!

 

I believe there were also periods of deflation back in those days, right ?

 

From a 1902 Sears catalog. Wish I could buy the Colt for 10 times that price today.

 

Found some of these items off that one site from CJay

-One dictionary cost $0.50 (1797)
-One 12-volume encyclopedia cost $20 (1820)
-One chest of drawers cost $2 (1802)
-One cow cost $10 (Charles County, MD, 1804)
-Total cost to build the President’s house for South Carolina College was $8,000 (1806)

-Ten pounds of sugar cost $0.20 (1822)
-One acre in a tract of land of over 400 acres cost $2.00 (Sumter, SC, 1823)
-One bushel (35.2 liters) of potatoes cost $0.12 (1829)
-One set of blue china cost $8.00 (1828)
-One cow cost $12.00 (1829)
-One Pound of Coffee Cost $0.17

 

i cant explain inflation to you without gettting into PRWE so ill skip that for now but i do know GD doesnt know much about snakes look at what happened to adam and eve

 

really your memory is good. i cant remember stuff from the 1940's but you can from 1812. which vitamin do you take?