h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Apropos of a conversation 2legs and I have been having on Twotter*...

My first proper paying job was a Saturday job at a local department store. You had to be 15 years and 3 months old to work one of those and I remember starting just before Christmas because on my second weekend I came in on the Sunday when the store was closed and packed Christmas hampers. We also played silly buggers in Father Christmas' grotto

That would have made it December 1971.

For working eight hours (9am - 6pm with a one-hour lunch break) I was paid the princely sum of £1.50, out of which I think I paid 13p deductions, leaving me all of £1.37 for the week. And by Jove, I had a bloody good time on £1.37. Apart from trolling off to the boozer for a liquid lunch every Saturday we'd come back to to the same pub later in the evening for several more.

I suppose I must have had other expenses at the time - records, clothes, all the kinds of things a teenager in the early 70s would have spent their wedge on - but it seems like beer took up a good proportion of my weekly income.

Start as you mean to go on - that's my motto

My first proper *full time* job started a few years later in September 1975, and it was well paid, at the time, for an unskilled job working in a factory. After bonuses (a production bonus based on weekly tonnage of choccies, plus one for daily timekeeping and another for not taking any days off during the week) I had around £33 a week before deductions, which means I took home about a pony.

While working at the dept. store I think beer was around 15p - 20p a pint, which means I had to work roughly an hour (17.125p) to buy a pint. By the time I was working full time it had gone up to around 20p - 25p a pint (scandal!), but by then I was earning 62.5p an hour. Be still my beating

That meant I could buy at least two pints of beer for every hour I worked Happy happy joy joy.

I do, very clearly remember when lager started to take off how it was 35p (7s 6d) a pint while most other beer was 30p and more fool the lager drinkers for their stupidity.

So what 2legs and I have been pondering is this: what's the average unskilled wage today and how long do you have to work in order to buy a pint of everyday, nuthin' fancy, ordinary bitter?

*Not a typo

We'd have to consider regional variations in both the price of an average pint of beer, plus, of course, I guess, regional variations in wage for this 'average' unskilled style job... Does the internets have any uptodate stats on average 'take home', wages, by region?

I started drinking beer, in the year, 1991 or 1992 I think hang on , should be able to think that more accurately.... oops, no, 1990. when I was 14.
We were paying (and this was cheap, locally), £1 per pint then, for a pint in teh local microbrewery with associated/connected 'tasting room'. Circa 1992 I had a couple of little jobs, which paid approx £3 per hour (but only a couple hours work, at each a week ) by circa late 1992 early 1993 I was paying £1.76 a pint

well, minimum wage is £6.31, so assume that's what the unskilled get paid nowadays and according to this website from August last year (http://www.mirror.co.uk/money/personal-finance/average-prices-pint-beer-across-2234409) it's around £3 for a pint of larger. Which means you have to work about half an hour.

Guess, then, as strange as it seems, its comparatively about* the same price... how odd!..

I don't find that odd or surprising. I've digested several news stories over the past decade or so about how certain consumer items - including food in general - have dropped in price compared to 30 or 40 or 50 years ago in terms of how long you have to work in order to pay for them. Beer (which I consider a foodstuff ) is different because it's taxed in a way that food isn't, but it's still comparable in that way, and if you took off all the heinous tax increases that have been put on beer in recent years it'd be even cheaper in terms of work hours to buy it.

If you're in a well-paid unskilled job it's even better, obviously. Although there was no minimum wage at the time, the job I had at the choccie factory would qualify as well-paid, or higher than a theoretical minimum wage.

Oh, definatly, a lot of food has gotten cheaper, and simularly things like clothing now, (assuming one is willing to cast asides concerns regarding where cheap clothing was made, and under what conditions). Some stuff; housing and rents in particular though, has just skky-rocketed... and also things like gas/elec...

I think its pretty reasonable price wise, where I can go to the butchers once a week, and then to the fishmongers, and spent maybe £10 at each, and probably less than £10 on top of that for other bits, veg etc, feed myself (hmm, probably add £5 PW for flour for bread making!) and, taht certainly isn't eating 'crap'.... no doubt if I went the supermarket ready meal way, it'd be even cheaper... just more digusting though although.... a nigh tout on beer easy matches my whole weeks grocerys probably I vaguely recall, circa my first year at Uni, circa 1997 maybe into 1998, I would vary between spending £20 and £25 PW on food, though I was probably eating quite a differnt 'variety' of food back then Mind, all pales in to insignificence when I work out how much my cheap cigarettes cost me per week

My grandfather noticed something interesting throughout his lifetime. Car batteries remained the same price. They were always, in his life at least, $1/month. When he first started driving a car battery cost around $12 and lasted for one year. When he told me this, car batteries lasted around 48 months and cost $45-$50.

I think he also mentioned a similar price stability with the price of coffee and how long he had to work to buy a cup.

That's interesting, bearing in mind the fluctuations in the price of coffee beans on the commodity markets.

Yeah, but I'm really not sure about that one... I could be confusing his battery comment with some econ lecture.

The average price of a pint is a bit misleading, because the range now is so great compared to back then. When I started in bar work in the 90s, beer varied between £1 and £3 a pint. Now it varies between £2.50 and £40.

Yes, there are some very expensive beers out there.

But you can still go out and spend £2.50 a night, all night every night. You're not paying the average price, but it's what you'll pay.

Coffee, and the drinking thereof, out in cafes is getting worse than the price of beer!; not the most massive mug in the world, and its at least* £3 round here.... and it doesn't seem very* long ago to me, I was getting cups in the cafe (now no longer there, they retired), virtually next to my house, for 90 pence.... and as I only moved here in 1999 it can't be that* long ago But some things just don't match others; the price of a tin of tuna has just gone insanely expensivep; always used to be a really cheap thing to buy, and now I only get it when its on special offer, at about £4.50 for 4 tins, rahter than the £6 or £7 which seems average full price nowdays round here TAlking of inflation.... acccording to the E-mail I just got, which monitors/tracks house prices, I made £30000 in the last six months; by doing nothing cept let my house decay a little bit more taht's just insane...

That's why I specified a pint of ordinary bitter, Pastey, so that the comparison could be like-for-like. When I started drinking there wasn't much more than bitter, best bitter and Guinness on tap in the local pubs, plus a draft cider, brown ale and light ale in bottles, and in some places a dusty bottle of Worthington White Shield that might have been sitting on the shelf for... months on end.

I drank ordinary bitter at the time, which amounted to either Watney's Red Barrel or Double Diamond. I know, ghastly - but it's pretty much all there was at the local (although I did go through a, thankfully short-lived, phase of drinking brown ale and cider mixed. I don't know why). If we went to a certain pub a few miles into the Essex countryside - a free house - we could get all kinds of other exotic brews, some even out of a beer engine, but for the average night out in town it was mostly Watneys, Bass Charrington or Ind Coope. Fullers and Youngs didn't have a presence in far north-east London.

I can't remember now what the price of something like Courage Best (an ordinary bitter despite its name) was at the Chiswick pub where I worked in 1999... no, wait. It must have been between £2.00 and £2.50 because I remember that if someone bought three pints of one of the beers on tap it'd come to £7.47.

I don't mind the price of tuna going up as I hope it lowers demand. Tuna is being seriously overfished and not just the yellowfin for sushi. But it's more likely the price is going up because of scarcity which increases the market price per fish further threatening the fish remaining.

A pint of ordinary bitter varies between 2 and 4 quid a pint.

If I'm drinking ordinary bitter and they try charging more than 3 quid, I'll go elsewhere.

I will however pay a lot more for decent beer.