In 1984, I bought a Chevrolet Chevette for $3,000, or about $11,000 in today’s dollars.
That was for the entire car; not a per-month financing plan. Today, the Chevy Trax is an entry-level option for about $28,000 and the average new American-made car is $48,000, according to Kelley Blue Book.
Insane.
My Chevette, also known as Bertha, was blue with a black grille (a departure from chrome) took me from the piney woods of North Louisiana to the deserts of the Southwest into the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles and back. Bertha was built like a box-turtle, and the engine sometimes growled like a wounded animal, but the car was reliable companion. No frills. No heated seats or power windows. It just got me where I needed to go.
I miss Bertha. More importantly, I miss the simplicity of what Bertha represented in terms of the cost of goods and services back then. Today, everything has become too danged expensive. Bargains began to feel more like marketing trickery. And increasingly it seemed like new business school graduates were entering companies to squeeze the life out of our wallets.
Mom used to say you can’t get blood out of a turnip. These new marketing geniuses did not get the memo.
Somewhere along the way, ordinary life in America became expensive in ways that feel bigger than inflation. It feels now like every product, every service and every sale comes with another fee, another upgrade, another monthly subscription or another hand reaching in your pocket. I don’t want these strange hands in my pocket.
We are exhausted, not because we expect life to be cheap, but because being nickeled and dimed to death is taking its toll.
A CBS/YouTube poll released on May 17 found that Americans are mostly pessimistic about the state of the economy, citing uncertainty and struggling financial conditions.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s consumer price index, in April inflation reached its highest level since 2023 as prices rose 0.6% from March to April and were up nearly 4% over the same period in 2025.
When I hear bad economic news coupled with high prices that continue to escalate — gas, food, trousers and basic cable TV — I wonder. What gives?
Years ago, my cousin Herbert ran a general store along a dusty rural crossroads known as St. Mary’s, a hilly bucolic settlement just west of town.
McCauley’s Grocery, established by his dad, sold Esso gas pumped by Herbert himself, after which he “rung you up” on a heavy metal cash register, which produced a cacophony of dings, levers and mechanical whirligigs that was an aural delight.
There were no mirrors mounted on Herbert’s wall to catch suspected shoplifters or cameras to hold evidence. After all, the door from the freezer led to the kitchen of their attached home, where his elementary school teacher wife could have been frying chicken, tutoring a kid or both.
These were neighbors, about 20 families tops, including mine. Folks just got what they needed — a loaf of bread, some alarmingly red hot dogs, a dozen eggs, a honey bun and sometimes even a jar of Hormel pickled pigs’ feet.
Herbert, sometimes working as gas attendant and other times a butcher, would also slice bologna to perfection and wrap it in white parchment for the people. This process horrified me because I always feared he would slice off a finger. More times than not, this was a “ticket” purchase to tie over families until payday which could be days or weeks away. Herbert might even throw in a palm-sized lemon-flavored cookie from the bin for the kids. Most families would make good on the credit purchase.
Today, they have a new name for pigs’ feet — trotters — and serve them on fancy restaurant menus after being prepared low and slow.
In my community, I saw neighbors share food from their garden with one another: figs, okra, tomatoes and beans, sweet potatoes, peanuts and watermelons. Sometimes, a fishmonger would pass through with a catch from the Red River one mile away that would feed a family of eight for less than $5. The fishmonger could then feed his own family.
During hunting season, the meat from harvested deer found its way into the deep freezers of multiple families.
“Shade tree” mechanics would fix things instead of financing replacements.
If you predicted that America would someday pay for refrigerated bottled water in a cardboard crate or at the local Speedway, or gamble on soccer games on the very phones in their hands, or have dinner delivered to the house with said phone and a credit card, no one would believe it.
Surely, my grandmother Martha, a huge fan of Folgers instant coffee, could not fathom someone paying for even a $2 cup of coffee, if you can find such a price today outside of what you brew in your own kitchen.
However, this period is different. The current generation may be the first not to do as well as the previous, financially, according to multiple predictions.
Fifty years ago, one income was enough for some families to have the “American Dream” of a home with a car in the garage and hunger was not much of an issue.
Like me, maybe all Americans are not longing for the past. Maybe they are longing for a life that feels manageable. A life where a trip to the grocery store did feel like conquering a math problem.
And where ordinary people trying to scrape out a living could still afford a little breathing room. It’s not that everything was perfect back then. It certainly was not.
Today, however, many people are asking whether they can fill the gas tank, repair the truck, pay the insurance bill and still have enough to take the grandkids out for pizza on Saturday.
Perhaps that’s why some of us talk about better days in the past.
Again, nothing was ever perfect. But it felt like ordinary life was not so tenuous. And it seemed like folks relied on one another more when times were rough.
Somewhere between my $3,000 Chevette and today’s $78,000 Ford F-150 Lariat, somewhere between rag bologna and artisanal charcuterie, America stopped feeling affordable to ordinary people.
And if you’re like me, I know you are tired of feeling nickel-and-dimed to death.
Byron McCauley is regional columnist for USA Today Co. Email: bmccauley@usatodayco.com; call (513) 504-8915.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Why is everything so dang expensive in America? | Opinion
Reporting by Byron McCauley, Holland Sentinel / The Holland Sentinel
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