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.

Same. We’re half pennies still in existence then? Am sure you could buy half penny sweets then.

Were

Probably not in most city centres. But definitely in Wigan. Was out at the weekend in Wigan and never paid more than £4.30 anywhere.

I was 10/11 back then too. Yes £5 was a decent amount. I got less than that for pocket money.

I had my first Saturday job in 1983 aged 14, and earned about £9.60 a day. That seemed like a fortune back then.

I was 21. A packet of cigarettes was just over a £1. Probably less than £1.50. A cab home from the west end to just sputh of the river was about £5.

I don't think £5 was a fortune but it was nice to have a fiver in your purse. In 1981 I recall it cost me just under £7 to fill up with petrol - in my super-mini.

Relatively speaking clothes and white goods were more expensive than now.

In the late 1970s unemployment pay was 15 pound a week.
That was the basic rate for a youth.
No supplementary benefit as no children or housing costs as expected to be living with parents.
I know this as I found an uncashed girocheque...

£5 was what a relative would put in a birthday card for me, aged 7 in 1981, so for a child £5 represents an amount of money that would feel like a treat. And to have that amount repeated with multiple bottles, it's like... all your birthday cards coming at once!

The tooth fairy was only good for 50p, in comparison, as £1 was a note back them and she didn't carry that sort of rustling, child-waking bullion.

Besides which, I don't think Roald Dahl is a reliable benchmark for fiscal history. How much was Willy Wonka charging for an everlasting gobstopper? What's the economic sense in that? But I guess if he'd sold the three-course chewing gum patent to the NHS as an obesity-solving meal replacement he might have made enough cash to compensate the Oompah-Loompas, and pay off some of the H&S claims around chocolate river deaths.

My grandparents rent on their council house was £6.20 a week in 1980.

Paying similar for a bottle of medicine would have seemed huge.

A first-class stamp in the UK cost 14p in 1981

My first job in 'what everyone wants' was 88p per hour and that was in about 1995. £20 for a bottle of medicine would have been a big deal. Anyway its a fictional book. Not sure you can rely on Roald Dahl as being the benchmark doe reality.

I remember petrol being 75p a gallon! It’s now more than double that per litre so 10 x more expensive basically. Other things haven’t increased as much if at all, clothes and electronics in particular have stagnated in cost eg I remember my school jumper for secondary being £9.99, my DD’s was £9.99 and my neighbour bought her dcs jumper only yesterday for you’ve guessed it £9.99 over 45 years later.

Bit of a slow day?

I had a job in pub around that time and beer was 20p per pint.

AI talks a lot of nonsense, ignore it.
I was getting paid £4 an hour in 1981 which was respectable for a young graduate but not high flying .
In the story perhaps the character had a childlike view of what counts as a large sum of money?

I have a shelf full of Penguin books from 1981 in the National Library I work in, the lowest price is £1.99!for a thin one, normal sized ones range from £3.99-4.99

I’m surprised to be honest. I have famous five books from early 80s and they say 80p on the back. Maybe kids books were cheaper.

When I started working in '84, my take home teaching pay was about £80 a week.

I recall that in '78, '79 the price for an ordinary blouse was about £3.99. In 1979 I bought myself what was then to me a very expensive blouse in a boutique - £11.

It lasted me for years, until I fractured my arm in the '90s and needed to cut an arm off so that I could get my plaster cast through.

You could still buy individual sweets in my local general store’s pick’n’mix for a ha’penny when I was a kid. Although the big chocolate saws cost 2p each. And the packs of candy cigarettes cost more (I wasn’t allowed them).

Halfpenny coins were still around until 1984.

So yes scale it up… £5 was 1,000 sweets. So as a kid that would have been a lot.

It bought you a lot. Bruce Springsteen on The River Tour was £6.50 and I saw 4 x shows. But gigs were reasonable then.

There are lots of different ways to consider changes in monetary value. If you're interested in it, the website measuringworth.com has a calculator that will tell you possible values and explains all the different ways of looking at it.

Mint mo jos - 2 for 1/2p so 4 for 1p

sure I used to buy 5p worth with so 20 of them

You could buy 10 cigarettes and a box of matches for 50p early 80s when I was at school.

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

It was just an idle thought while reading last night and took me about 5 mins to google it this morning while I was eating my breakfast and then start this thread.

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

Well for sure. But it wasn't just calpol or something, it made grandmas tunnel through the roof and chickens into horse sized beasts.

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

It was on the Google AI summary thing which pops up when you search anything. I thought it sounded like a load of nonsense TBH. I know things were cheaper but I didn't think a pint would be 12p or a pack of cigarettes 20p or for that matter cost more than a burger.

The Google AI summary is often hilariously wrong anyway.