Cost of Living in the Midst of the Great Depression Baffles the Internet (2024)

FAQs

What was the cost of living in the Great Depression compared to today? ›

Cost of Living

We are continuing to see these prices rise. During The Great Depression the cost of living was an average of $4,000 per year, today that amount would be equivalent to $60,575. Yet, the average salary was $1,125 per year.

A new house had a price tag of $3,900, which sounds attainable given that the average income was $1,731 per year. A new set of wheels would set you back $860, a movie ticket was just 25c, gas was 10c per gallon and a postage stamp was 3c.

The median annual pay during the Great Depression was 22% of the cost of an average home. Today, it's 14%. It's harder to buy a house today than it was during the Great Depression.

With no job and no savings, thousands of Americans lost their homes. The poor congregated in cardboard shacks in so-called Hoovervilles on the edges of cities across the nation; hundreds of thousands of the unemployed roamed the country on foot and in boxcars in futile search of jobs.

Business titans such as William Boeing and Walter Chrysler actually grew their fortunes during the Great Depression.

The United States average farm price of eggs on August 15, 1934 Was 17.2 cents per dozen. During the fall of 1934 they made a fairly normal seasonal advance to a peak of 28.6 cents on November 15.

But when the Great Depression hit in 1929, fewer people could afford milk and dairy farmers still had a lot of milk to sell. The price dropped from 35¢ per gallon to 26¢ per gallon. It doesn't sound like much, but 9¢ in 1930 is about $1.09 in today's dollars.

Although Sicker provided cardboard signs that read “Unemployed: Buy Apples 5 cents each,” many sellers devised their own price schemes. The New York Times reported that, in the fall of 1930, just after the program started, venders were selling apples as high as 50 cents a pop and grossing more than $16 a day.

Before 1950, most U.S. families rented their homes. Renters in 1931 paid an average of $18 per month to their landlord in rent.

What was the hardest year in the Great Depression? ›

At the height of the Depression in 1933, 24.9% of the nation's total work force, 12,830,000 people, were unemployed. Wage income for workers who were lucky enough to have kept their jobs fell 42.5% between 1929 and 1933. It was the worst economic disaster in American history.

The average rent during 1932 was only $18.00 per month However, the average income was only $1,652.00 per year. The average cost of a new automobile today is $49,000, but the average wage earned has risen to $54,000 per year.

Money. During the Great Depression, which occurred from 1929 to 1933, many Americans lost all of their money and were not able to get jobs. Therefore, they were not able to buy food. Since most people did not have enough money to shop for food, there wasn't enough business to keep most of the groceries fully stocked.

Ironically, it was World War II, which had arisen in part out of the Great Depression, that finally pulled the United States out of its decade-long economic crisis.

Soup kitchens and bread lines were methods of feeding the neediest people in the country during the Great Depression. Run by charities, private companies, and the government, many soup kitchens and bread lines served thousands of people a day.

Reduced prices and reduced output resulted in lower incomes in wages, rents, dividends, and profits throughout the economy. Factories were shut down, farms and homes were lost to foreclosure, mills and mines were abandoned, and people went hungry.

Psychologists and sociologists have noted that the effects of depression-era hardships can shape the behavior of people for the rest of their lives, impacting activities ranging from saving money to job preferences, food conservation, and even birth rates.

The best we can hope for is price stability. Yet during the Great Depression, prices for many goods and services fell significantly, and stayed low throughout much of the decade.

The economic collapse was terrifying in its scope and impact. By 1933 average family income had tumbled 40 percent, from $2,300 in 1929 to just $1,500 four years later.