The Good Old Days
 

Was cleaning out a closet in my folks house and dredged up a mid-60s catalog from Service Armament Company. Deep in nostalgia mode (I remember the back-of-magazine ads, Lugers for $35) I wandered through its pages until I came upon their Luger items.

http://boards.rennlist.com/upload/ServiceArms.jpg

Service Arms Big Left Page
Service Arms Big Right Page

My, how prices have increased!...or, have they? These prices are almost 40 years old, I began to wonder what they would be in money with today's value? So, I found an inflation calculator, and began to plug in figures.

Service Armament 4" barrel Lugers, grade 1, $54.95 in 1965 dollars, would be $301.89 in 2001 dollars (the closest year I could find figures for). An LP-08 at $79.95 would be $439.23 in current figures.

A drum magazine, $24.95 = $137.07; loading tool $29.95 = $164.54.

Magazines at $4.95 = $27.90, extruded mags at $8.50 = $46.70.

An ERMA .22 converter kit at $34.95 = $192.01

A pre-WWI 9mm collector's cartridge for $.75 would be $4.12 in today's money, and Remington 9mm ammo $4.00/hundred would be $21.98.

I recalled seeing other catalogs and prices posted here in the past, so I did a quick search to see if I could find them and do the same calculation. I found a few (frankly I didn't search exhaustively), came up with the following:

Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, 1904
Model 1900 Luger $25.00 = $434.11
Same with Ideal shoulder stock $31.00 = $586.65
Magazines $1.00 = "18.92

P. von Frantzius catalog, 1924
4" barrel Luger new, $24.50 = $245.16
Same used, $17.50 = $175.00
Artillery stock rig, $6.50 = $65.04

Interarms 1972
New mfg. Mauser Parabellum retail $290.00 = $1,219.65

My $35.00 Luger of nostalgic memory in, say, 1960, would be $204.50 today.

Without drawing too many conclusions, it appears that over 100 years the average common Luger has only gone up %100 or less in real purchasing dollars until fairly recently--"average" "common" and "recently" being arguable concepts.

This brief exercise has interesting and pretty revealing. If you have your own copies of old catalogs you can carry on yourself, here is a link to the inflation calculator I used, have fun.

--Dwight

Dwight,
Here's another one from the latest American Rifleman, according to your calculator the price today would be $491!
http://boards.rennlist.com/upload/lugerad.jpg

If you go through the gyrations of the economic models, invented by econonomists, (the folks who assume a *great deal*), consider the Number 4, Mark I-III SMLE. These should have negative worth...people should pay me to take them away, since they generally cost about the same or less than they did 30 years ago.

So much for economic modeling...

Tom A