Well, it turns out many of them aren’t as old as people want to believe they are. Here is a page from a 1978 mail order catalog. As you can see, the owls were available complete with glass eyes for $31.95. If you think that’s a good price, I have a 1964 catalog that has them for only $10.95. A 1971 catalog has them for $12.95. So one can see that inflation between 1964 and 1971 wasn’t that bad. The owls only went up in price by roughly 18% in those 7 years. Jumping from 1971 to 1978, however, one can see that in those 7 years, the price for the owls shot up by a whopping 147%. So, just in case you weren’t around in the 1970's, that’s how bad inflation got after the oil embargo earlier in that decade. All it took for prices to shoot up was a global crisis, you know, just as we are living through today.
Just for full disclosure, it wasn’t just the owl andirons that shot up in price. There are plenty of other items in these catalogs that had the same huge price increase by the end of the 1970's. I thought these andirons just made a better example than say, soapstone griddles.
