OK, I looked it up for myself, and the one penny = five dollars conversion doesn't seem too far from the truth. This page gives some 18th-century prices for var

OK, I looked it up for myself, and the one penny = five dollars conversion doesn't seem too far from the truth. This page gives some 18th-century prices for various things; in British pennies rather than US pennies, but I'm assuming they were similar in value since they were both small coins of copper: http://footguards.tripod.com/08HISTORY/08_costofliving.htm http://footguards.tripod.com/08HISTORY/08_costofliving.htm Half a penny = half a loaf of bread, implying bread was five bucks a loaf... just a bit too expensive by today's standards. 1.5 pennies was an hourly rate for a boy to chop firewood -- I bet you could hire a kid for $7.50 an hour nowadays. 1 penny was enough gin to get drunk on... a third of a bottle of the cheapest $15 gin would get you pretty drunk. 4d was a quart of beer. OK, that's pretty expensive. 1s (12 pence) gets you a dinner at a steakhouse with beer... yep, sixty bucks is a plausible price for a steak dinner. It's also the sign-on bonus for joining the Army, which seems like a bit of a gyp, or postage for a letter from London to New York. (!) So in conclusion, if you take the one penny to five dollars conversion, then some things (basic foodstuffs) seem expensive while others (labour) seem cheap. This is consistent with the fact that people were much poorer (in real terms) back then, and you'd have to chop wood for 40 minutes just to buy a loaf of bread. It still seems like a weird way to use money, but I guess that's just because I've grown up in a world where it's entirely possible to undercut your competition by 1% on the price of a loaf of bread. If that ability went away, I might not miss it.