Posted by Rick Denney on July 15, 2002 at 13:05:18:
Let's say that you bought a brand-new York Model 716 BBb Side Action Bass in 1923. The price for the basic lacquered model, including mouthpiece, lyre, "piston wiper", and carrying strap would have been $195 if you paid in cash. This was 1923--before the crash of the stock market, before the Great Depression. Times were good, sorta like they are now, unless you lived in Europe.
The Consumer Price Index in 1923 was around 50, and now it's around 510, with 1967 normalized to 100. (I got this from the government's web page on the topic.) Applying this factor, the price of the York when it was new in current dollars was a hair less than $2000.
Arnold Jacobs paid Phillip Donitelli $175 for his York as a used instrument. That was in about 1931, which was after the crash and when we were still headed to the bottom of the Depression. In current real dollars, that was a price of about $2350. (He sold that instrument for what has been reported as $25,000, which represents about a 3.4% return on the investment, adjusted for inflation. I'd take that.)
Here's the point that interested me (and probably nobody else): Tubas have gained in real value by a factor of about three to five over the decades, given that a tuba of comparable value is priced between $6000 and $10000. A tuba is intrinsically worth more now than it was then, compared to everything else that people buy. The macro-economic ramifications of this make me curious. Is cost higher in real dollars, forcing manufacturers to raise their prices? Are tubas just plain better, such that tuba players are willing to pay a larger percentage of their salary? Have production techniques for most consumer items improved so much that resulting lower prices have skewed the inflation rate against tubas? Does it mean that I'm goofing off too much today after spending most of the day yesterday reading 75 resumes of staff we are including in a big proposal?
Rick "who thinks his wife won't accept 'a hedge against inflation' as a reason to buy more tubas" Denney