Was £5 a lot of money in 1981?

[BertieBotts]

I was reading DS3 George's Marvellous Medicine and when George's dad the farmer sees what the medicine can do he says they are going to make more medicine and sell it for £5 a bottle and become rich. Obviously the amount was more when the book was published, which was 1981 (I suppose it could have been written in the 70s).

I was only born in the late 80s but this didn't sound very much to me so I put it into an inflation calculator and it came up as about £20. Which also seemed a bit too low - if you had a magic medicine that could create giant animals you'd charge more for it wouldn't you? I put it into Google and this is what the AI summary came up with which sounds bonkers to me. Translating all the items it could supposedly buy seems more like over £100 in today's money. Which TBF, sounds like a better price for a magic medicine. So I thought I'd ask some real people who were alive then which interpretation is true.

Based on inflation calculators, £5 in 1980 is equivalent to over £27 in 2026.
Here is what £5 could buy in the UK during the early-to-mid 1980s:
Pints of Beer: Around 40 pints of ordinary bitter.
Tobacco: About 20-25 packets of 20 cigarettes.
Entertainment: Around 20 Penguin paperback books.
Travel: A standard 2nd class return ticket from London to Liverpool or Manchester.
Food: Approximately 30 burgers from a burger bar.

That’s all nonsense.

I think you have too much time on your hands OP !

But I was 10 in 1980 and £ 20 for a bottle of medicine would have seemed like a huge amount to my parents

I was paid £11 per day for my 1st Saturday job in 1985, and that seemed like a lot at the time.

I earned £5 doing my weekly paper round or a few hours babysitting. I thought I had loads of money.

Inflation isn’t the same across all goods and services though. Look at house prices for a start.

Hourly rates of pay in retail would be under £2, certainly were for Saturday staff in the late 80s think I earned £1.62

National minimum wage wasn’t around then I think I earn £1.40 Ish in my part-time job at the co-op

So a bottle would cost maybe half a day wages in comparison to now I certainly wouldn’t want to spend Half a day wages on medication

I was the age to buy burgers in 1981 and you couldn’t get 30 for a fiver

In 1981 you could buy a Beano for 20p (this was an important fact as it was a major part of my pocket money budgeting plans). As a Beano now costs £3.75 I would estimate that "you could sell that for £5" should be read as "you could sell that for £95"

I started work in 1974 and earned £63 a month. In 1981 I earned a lot more than that because of inflation, though I can’t remember exactly how much

I got 50p a week pocket money in the 80’s. £5 would have seemed like a lottery win to me!

In 1982 I earned £20 a week, for a 40 hour week.

Bank of England inflation calculator says £19.

I was paying £12 a week rent in 1980.

Those figures are all wrong! Where on earth did you find them?

I was long grown up in the 80s and can tell you that a fiver certainly did not buy lots of pints of beer or 20 packets of fags!

A fiver would have been quite a lot in the late 60s, when my first holiday job on a supermarket checkout earned me £8.50 a week (of which I had to give my DM £3) and you could buy a reasonable pair of shoes for £2.50-£3.

Yep, back in 1979 I received 50p pocket money a week but my mate got a fiver and was viewed as incredibly rich by comparison. Her parents both worked in a local factory and earnt good wages.

I earns £1 per hour in a tearoom on a Saturday-circa 1986 - so £7 a day. First admin job age 17 - £34 per week. Can't remember much else really but did manage to get a credit card with my £34 a week job and bought a few clothes from Chelsea Girl. In comparison now, my kids seem extremely well off.

I was 9 in 1981, and it would have seemed like unimaginable riches to me!

One of the thingsi remember when reading KM Peyton's Fly-By-Night was that her brother earned £10 a week, and even to me, that seemed quite low. I would probably have been only a couple of years older than I had been in 1981. It was published 1968.

I got 20p a week pocket money then; could get a decent chunk of sweets from the sweet shop for that. So yeah, £5 was riches.

I too got 20p a week - foam strawberries were two for half a penny in the village shop!

In 1984 my cousin's had YTS jobs at £26 a week. A fiver as an enormous amount of money to a child in 1980

I had a babysitting gig in 1983 (every day after school for about 2 hours) and got £5 a week.
I was rich for a teenager and could buy as much Rimmel makeup as I wanted with that.

Regarding AI on Google, it's a better search tool than it was but it's probably the worst one in common use. The Penguin books one is well wrong. I've just nipped to the library shelf to prove it but didn't really need to.

As regards the medicine bottle cost, £5 for one bottle would have been a lot in those days. Presumably priced not too high to be affordable. Also, I tend to think Dahl set his novels in a somewhat unreal and invented tone and place in the past not the present.

It cost me about £13 iirc in 1984 for a Glastonbury ticket. Some things have gone up massively

I’m not sure where you’d have got pints for 12.5p even back then but I suppose it’s plausible! I was 14 and doing a Saturday job in a hairdressers in 1981 which paid about £7 per day IIRC. So £5 wasn’t extravagant riches but it was enough to do quite a lot with. I worked weekends in various jobs from age 13 and was able to pay for driving lessons and buy a car by the time I was 17, as well as having enough extra for clothes and going out.

In 1981 we were saving to get married. I earned £150 a month and my now DH was on £200 a month. We both had what were considered decent jobs. Our monthly shopping bill was around £60, which covered all our food and household things like washing powder etc.
I think it's difficult to work out 'equivalent' current day prii because some items have reduced in real terms price as time has gone on. For example, my fil bought a VHS recorder in 1980 and asked DH to pick up a 2 hour tape to record the Olympic games. Just one tape cost £11! By the time video recorders finally disappeared, I was buying a pack of 5, 3 hour tapes in Woolies for about £4.99!
I would have thought a bottle of medicine for a fiver at that time would have been ridiculously expensive, especially when you consider that the cost of a prescription was around 70p!