Unfortunately, everything on the list, from Big-Mac’s to a new home, to a new Rubik’s cube, are way more expensive. Almost unsurprisingly there was only one item on the list that stayed even roughly the same price: the U.S. postage stamp. In 1985, a postage stamp cost 22 cents, when that price is adjusted for inflation it comes out to 52 cents which is actually about what you would pay for a stamp right now. Still, two items on the list actually got cheaper: milk, eggs, and personal computers. In 1985, milk cost $1.09 ($2.56 after inflation), a dozen eggs were about a dollar ($2.39 after inflation), and Apple’s first personal computer cost $2,500 ($6,081 after inflation). Today a dozen eggs only cost about $1.40, milk is $1.96 per a half gallon, and personal computers are so ubiquitous, that one can be bought for $400. Milk is actually cheaper for a handful of reasons linked to practices like trade liberalization, where countries impose lower tariffs on each other to trade goods, but the most notable reason is simply that milk has a much longer shelf life today than it did in 1985. For example, a company in Brazil extended the shelf life of milk by a week using nanotechnology. Personal computers have just gotten easier to build, so much so that a laptop computer today is 96 percent cheaper than a 1994 model and 1,000 times better.
