I was just thinking in the back of my head about how cheap LEDs have made types of lighting that would’ve cost way too much (both to install, and in electricity usage) no longer stupidly expensive.
For example, I noticed on Amazon some cheap furniture that has LEDs/power outlets sort of integrated right into them. Looks pretty cyberpunk-ish to my eyes. And I know years ago that sort of thing would’ve been marked up to high heavens.
Fancy lighting in general has changed drastically in price/design.
So…what are some things, due to changes in demand or changes in tech or changes in anything…that would’ve been really expensive back in the day, but which no longer seem to be, making them more frugal than they used to be?
International phone calls. Actually long distance domestic phone calls too.
If it’s okay to go waaaaay back: salt. It’s always mind-blowing to me that people all over europe during the medieval age or even before that couldn’t season anything with salt cause it often was as expensive as gold itself. If I imagine those huge amounts of salt if you wanna pickle some meat or fish. Today salt costs nearly nothing, nearly everybody can afford it and it’s so basic that some even don’t consider it “seasoning” at all.
I imagine those beside the ocean must have figured out what happens when boiling sea water. But I guess it was scaling it that was an issue?
Tons of English phrases and words have salty origins, like salary.
Yeah, the scaling and transportation. If you wanted salt near the alps it was expensive as hell and mostly the salt came from mines, but that was a very difficult task.
Salary comes from salty? Like in a good way? I know an old “word” for salt in German is “weißes Gold” (white gold).
Sal is latin (and also French to this day) for salt. Salary referred originally to the amount of salt you received as payment.
Wikipedia functionally ended the market for encyclopedias. When I was a kid I would go to the library and read an encyclopedia just to see what random knowledge was in there. Traveling salesman would sell encyclopedias door to door and they were hugely expensive. Then Encarta came along and it was mind blowing you could have all that information on some CDs. Then Wikipedia killed all of them and did it for free.
When computers began to take hold in middle class homes, one of the biggest gold rushes was to be the encyclopedia of choice on the computer, since consumers saw encyclopedia software as an obvious (and maybe best!) use case for a computer.
TVs are very cheap now. The 40" Samsung LCD in my basement cost $1,200 fifteen years ago. It will soon be replaced by a 43" Samsung 4K TV that costs under $300.
DVD players used to cost $500+ and are now practically free.
I pay $15/month for xbox game pass and have access to hundreds of games. I don’t own them but I can if I want to.
Our first colour tv cost about 3 months of my dad’s salary in the early 1970s. And the Siemens mainframe computer in the company he worked for was tens of thousands (which was more than a year’s worth of the average salary). Rent. Every month. It had less computing power than my smartphone.
I always used to figure a decent desktop computer would cost me between $2k and $3k. That’s going back to the early 90s. But even though the value of a dollar has plummeted since then, you can get a decent desktop for significantly less, maybe half.