J
jeff...
Man look at these pieces of wood furniture and the prices :swoon:
http://www.arcadiami.com/Exhibits/Factory/showroom1909.htm
http://www.arcadiami.com/Exhibits/Factory/showroom1909.htm
Just for fun I ran 1909 through an inflation calculator program I have:
What cost $1 in 1909 would cost $22.81 in 2007. Also, if you were to buy exactly the same products in 2007 and 1909, they would cost you $1 and $0.05 respectively. Jim
Man look at these pieces of wood furniture and the prices :swoon:
http://www.arcadiami.com/Exhibits/Factory/showroom1909.htm
I think a better calculation would be more of logarithmic on a 50 year basis. By that, the $2.75 Somnoe would have cost $27.50 in 1957, and $275.00 today. The $11.50 dresser would have been $115 in '57 and 1,150 today. Looking at cars, prices today are about 10 times what they were in 1958, as well as what was considered a "living wage" at that time.
Go
One reason they may have gone out of business was poor accounting. According to the pay stub, he made $15.00 and they took 96¢ out for SS and Taxes which left him $15.04. With that kind of extravagant mis-calculation they would go under pretty quick.
Don that's on nice dresser - did you make that?
.
No, I didn't make it. It was my gransparents dresser, and it didn't look anything like that when I got it; it had a real dark varish - almost black (to cover all the ink spots on the top).
-Don
Even though they might not have had power tools in the sense that we think of them today, I'll bet that that they were running power tools off of a line shaft. Even so, I would agree that much of that work had to have been done by hand.
It would be interesting to know what the hourly or daily wage of those craftsmen was.
It's always interesting to see those old catalogs and price lists, as we tend to consider them in the context of what we experience today. Makes it almost laughable, but I suspect that furniture was fairly expensive for it's time.
Matt