You watch old movies where the characters go out to dinner and the movies and it only costs a few dollars. You hear stories from parents or grandparents about how they paid a few cents for a piece of candy when they were kids.

You hear stories about how a single income could support an entire family comfortably decades ago. You wonder why and how prices have become so high that the idea of something costing just a couple dollars doesn’t feel real.

The short answer is inflation. While many of us are making more money that generations in the past, it is not necessarily going as far because the cost of everything else has also gone up.

Food, housing, gas and transportation, clothing, etc. The costs of goods now would probably seem entirely outrageous if we were able to show someone from 1940.

Let’s take a look at some old photos of menus, markets, housing and vehicle adds, and gas prices over the last 100 years.