While traveling for the holidays, I bought gas at Midnight Oil in Ooltewah, TN for $1.36 a gallon. It wasn’t a fluke, another gas station across the highway was selling at the same price and other stations in the area were selling around $1.40 a gallon.
Using the calculators Measuring Worth.com, here’s the equivalent of the retail price of gas at 32 cents a gallon in 1968:
In 2007, $0.32 from 1968 is worth:
| $1.91 | using the Consumer Price Index | |
| $1.54 | using the GDP deflator | |
| $2.07 | using the value of consumer bundle * | |
| $1.97 | using the unskilled wage * | |
| $3.23 | using the nominal GDP per capita | |
| $4.86 | using the relative share of GDP | |
| * The 2007 observation for the unskilled wage is estimated. | ||
I used 2007 numbers because the site uses only annual numbers and 2008 numbers are not available yet.
Unfortunately, the suppliers are doing what they can to make sure prices don’t stay this cheap for long.