Everything's Quiet At The Ol' Five & Dime

(Here's a picture of an actual five & dime store.  From here.)

This week's show - next week's show - whatever - is another of my indiepop a to z shows, so I will have no interviews or other stuff, just songs with me talking in-between.  & since it'll be me in the studio, I don't have to record my airbreaks, which means a little less work for me.  I can't tell you how much work it is to record one's airbreaks.  I've said it before, but I'll say it again: yes, I could just record it live as if I were live in the studio but as I listen back I am compelled to edit out mistakes & dumb things I say & all that.  I am incapable of letting it go when I have the ability to change it.  On my first show back on KBOO, me being a little nervous & somewhat unused to being live on the air, I got a call from a listener who laughed & said, "It's great hearing you making all the rookie mistakes! Your recorded shows were too perfect!"

So this week feels like it'll be quiet for me, but since I was raised in a convenience store, thinking about a five & dime store has made me think a little about my past.  I wish I had taken more photos or somehow saved more data because I can't be sure, for example, how much things cost back then.  Let's say forty years ago, in 1981, a time before I was allowed to work in the store (I was 13) but certainly a time when I was behind the counter observing my mother working.  What did things cost?

Here's what I found looking around the webs:

The price of a pack of cigarettes?  Around 65¢.  I do remember them being that cheap.

A candy bar?  Around 25¢.

A can of soda?  Maybe 35¢.
A comic book? I believe 60¢.  They got expensive very quickly; five years before they were half that.

You might be thinking, hey Gary!  What about things like milk, bread, fruit?  Well, it was a convenience store, & those things were usually priced more expensively than at a grocery store.

One site says gas was $1.25 a gallon in 1981, but surely that's a national average.  In Texas, gas didn't seem to rise above a buck a gallon until the late 80s or early 90s.

It's hard to find that information without looking too deeply which is why I wish I had kept some kind of record.  I honestly expected - as I guess we all do about our lives when we're young - that I'd be around the same things for - if not always, at least for most of my life.

Have I mentioned how many independent convenience stores there are in Portland?  That's a discussion for another day, though.