If you live in the Seattle area you’ve probably seen the ads (these masquerade as a sort of documentary or news update) where the “mythical Ivar’s submarine billboards” are being pulled up from the bottom of Puget Sound. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can catch up on the whole thing on Ivar’s Website .
Personally I think this is just an absolutely brilliant marketing campaign. I was even taken in for a minute… but only for a minute… There were a number of things that smelled fishy about the whole thing but over all it did sound kind of plausible. If you think the founder was a complete nut. The final nail in the coffin for all believability was when I did a quick calculation in my head regarding the first billboard….
Now 75 cents does sound like a good price for a cup of chowder…. in 2009 that is. However if you do the math or let the Inflation Calculator do it for you it turns out that $0.75 in 1955 (the date of the billboard) equates to about $5.91 in 2009 dollars. So to put that in perspective imagine that instead of 75 cents a cup the sign says $6 a cup. Not such a deal now. So that’s what it would have looked like to someone in 1955. If you run the calculation the other way you come up with 10 cents. That’s how much someone in 1955 would have paid for that same cup of chowder in order for it to have the same effect on their pocket book as 75 cents would now.
1 Comment
2009.10.13 at 10:17 pm
Thank you so much. I’ve been watching these ad’s and I just thought, if you could buy a loaf of bread in 1955 for a nickel, .75 for a cup of chowder seemed outrageous. Nice marketing ploy, though.