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.

What is the financial value of the giant animal-creating functionality? For some reason I haven't read the book so I'm not sure if this is all the medicine can do, but there are an awful lot of costs attached to giant animal creation (animal feed, vets' bills, giant horseshoes, public liability insurance, etc etc) and presumably only a niche demand.
So perhaps George's dad deliberately kept the price low to encourage impulse buying, before people had had a chance to think through the complexities?

Those figures are bonkers. A quick google has shown
a pint of bitter approx 50p
pack of 20 cigarettes 80p
paperback book £1
train ticket return Liverpool London £18.90
burger approx 50p

£5 a bottle just probably fit well into the sentence.

Its not whether £5 is a lot of money but how much it cost to make and how many bottles you could sell that would determine whether you'd become rich.

If it cost £1 to make and you could sell 10 bottles you'd not be rich, but obviously you would if you could sell millions of bottles.

Although its a children's story not a business plan.

It wasn’t a lot of money but you could buy something decent with it.
It would be what someone might give you for your birthday and it would have been like a child getting £20-£30 now

I earned £7.50 in my Saturday job at Woolworths in 1982. As a youngster my mum would send me to the shops for her Embassy No1 cigarettes and they were around a £1 a packet then.

I used to get £5 in a card from a relative for my birthday in the mid £80s. It wouldn't have been a staggering amount of money, £26 feels about right if that's what an inflation calculator says.

... there's also the very real risk that, once the medicine came on the market, giant animals would rapidly be banned, as with XL bullies, so people might be very wary of investing more than a fiver in this functionality.

Other questions that occur to me when it comes to pricing are:

How many giant animals can you make per bottle?
What are the costs involved in getting regulatory approval from the body that oversees veterinary medicines?
What limitations does the Advertising Standards Authority place on promotional claims to dramatically enlarge the size of an animal?
Would the medicine have to be advertised as prescription only, as with weight loss injections? What implications does this have for online sales? [Edit: Mail-order sales, not online sales, since this was the eighties]

If it's about £27 or whatever in today's money then that is quite expensive for a bottle of OTC medicine. Though there probably are pharmaceutical products that cost that or way more.

Back then it would get you 50 packets of Polo mints.

I still remember the furore when they went up to 12p.

In 1981 I was earning £89 a week FT basic in a trainee role. Filling up my Mini took £11. Rent on my three bed semi in the middle of the Wiltshire countryside was £50 a month, if this helps.

You could still get half penny sweets then. With a fiver you could get a thousand of them, not that people would spend anywhere near that much.

It would have been about then I used to go to the post office for a 10 p mix and pick from the open tray of sweets on the counter.

No sneeze guards or tongs in those days and the assistant would handle the sweets then the money with their bare hands. Never did us any harm.

I was on a YTS earning £23.50 per week until I landed my first full time job at £39.83 per week.

And you could get the sweets that looked like cigarettes. Can't remember what they were called but I'm sure they were 1p each. .

I was a student at uni in the early 1980s and I used to draw out £5 a week for spends. I was in a catered hall but still; that covered what I would do for a week or at least a few days. A half of cider in the hall bar was 24p. A record (my biggest vice at the time) was £3-4. That feels like quite a lot compared to the cider haha.

Oooh @RedRiverShore6 my Glasto ticket in 1986 was about £25 IIRC! Maybe £20.

I started work in 1986 and my weekly pay as a graduate (professional role tho traditionally a poorly paid one) was £108.

The book was written for children, and to children they would know what £5 was and that to them it was a lot of money, no point in him using an amount children can’t actually relate to.

You could buy 12 pints of beer for £5 in 1981. If you wanted to.

In some places, you wouldn’t get one pint of beer for £5 now.

And you could get the sweets that looked like cigarettes. Can't remember what they were called

They were called sweet cigarettes. I can't remember getting them individually but you could get them in boxes like cigarette packs.

Where can you get a pint for under a fiver these days except Wetherspoons? I'm not even in an expensive area and the norm appears to be about £6.

I still remember the fuss when they went from 1p to 1.5p.

A 50% increase overnight.

I started college in 1985.
In the pub next door a pint of beer was 78p, a pint of lager 84p and a pint of cider 86p - they only sold Woodpecker cider, and it was a tied Samuel Smith house so their own beers. A shot of lime or blackcurrant was 6p.
I have no idea why I remember those prices but it’s been a handy reference many times.

In my local pub. Guinness is £5 though.

There's a similar issue with Dr Seuss's The Cat In The Hat Comes Back. In the version I read to my children (a couple of decades ago), one of the disasters that occurs is that the pink spot stains "Dad's £7 shoes". Clearly, for dramatic purposes, these are meant to be expensive shoes that the spot has ruined. Otherwise, why mention the price at all.

I'm pretty certain that the original text would have priced the shoes in dollars, not pounds (presumably ten dollar shoes, which would have been pricey in the 1950s?) and that 'seven' was chosen because it meant that the line would still scan correctly, despite the loss of a syllable in pounds versus dollars.

So if they can amend the currency without violating the integrity of the text, why can't they amend the price, too, to take account of inflation? For twenty years ago, I would suggest "Dad's 100 pound shoes", which would scan correctly and indicate the scale of the incident.

Pretty much anywhere north of Birmingham.

Not in Leeds though.