What things cost in 1957: milk, bread, eggs, gas and a stamp

How to read this 1957 price table

Each line is a national average for 1957. The food prices come from one place: a bulletin the Bureau of Labor Statistics printed in 1959. It lists what Americans paid for about sixty foods, city by city and month by month.

That is why some lines show two numbers. An average for the year is fine for bread, which barely moved. It hides the story for eggs.

The other lines come from their own records. The minimum wage is from the Department of Labor. The stamp is from the Postal Service's rate history.

The egg that would not sit still

Hens lay on a schedule, and in 1957 the American kitchen still ran on it.

A dozen eggs cost 53.6 cents in January. By June they had dropped to 47.9 cents, the cheapest of the year. Then they climbed. They were 64.9 cents in September and hit 69.5 cents in October. From June to October, that is a jump of about forty-five percent.

Coffee did the opposite. It fell almost every month, from 108.2 cents to 95.0 cents. Nobody announced it. Families just got a small raise from the grocery store.

And the chocolate bar did not move at all. It was 4.5 cents in January and 4.5 cents in December. The same year that could not make up its mind about an egg was completely settled about a candy bar.

What one hour of work bought in 1957

A price means more next to a wage. In early 1957, a factory worker earned about $1.90 an hour. The federal minimum was one dollar.

One hour on a factory floor bought about ten pounds of bread, or eight quarts of milk. One hour at the minimum wage bought about five pounds of bread. Most months it bought a dozen eggs with change left over. It did not quite buy a one-pound can of coffee. You were about two cents short.

Those are simple sums, the published wage divided by the published price. They are not survey results.

More of the 1957 grocery list

The table above has the famous items. Here are the rest of the everyday prices the book gives, all yearly averages from the same 1959 bulletin.

What a TV, a fridge and a washer cost

Bigger things came out of the 1957 Sears catalog, which still survives. The book's figures come from the 1957 Sears Christmas Book.

Hold the fridge against a family income of $5,000 a year. It cost about a month's wages. That is why people bought these on time, and expected them to last twenty years.

What about a car or a house?

Most price lists give an "average" car and house price for 1957. The book does not, and it says why.

Cars. No reliable national average exists for 1957. So the book gives real prices for real cars. The Ford Fairlane 500 Skyliner, with a roof that folded into the trunk, cost $2,945. A Plymouth Belvedere four-door was $2,410. Next to a median family income of $5,000, a new car was about half a year's pay.

Houses. The Census Bureau measured the median house price only in census years, 1950 and 1960. There is no true 1957 figure. One famous sale does have a price: in March 1957, Elvis Presley bought Graceland, outside Memphis, for $102,500.

Records. The record prices that float around online could not be traced to a source for 1957, so the book leaves them out. A record player, as above, cost $76.95 at Sears.

Reading the prices out at the kitchen table

Picture the birthday. Someone reads out "a quart of milk, 23.4 cents," and the person turning seventy says, "We had a milkman." Then a story comes. The milk truck, the bottles on the step, who had to bring them in.

That is what these numbers are for. A price list on its own makes the past look easy. Bread at nineteen cents sounds like a cheap world. It was not. There was simply less to buy. Most homes had no air conditioning, no second phone and no second TV.

So read the prices, and then ask what is missing from the list.

Where the full price list lives

This is the problem The Year You Arrived: 1957 was written for. We trust its numbers because Nancy Whitaker lists every source at the back, and says plainly when a number could not be checked.

What Things Cost is the chapter for this page. It covers the meat counter, the produce aisle, the three things the year did with its prices, and the August turn into a recession that nobody saw at the time.

The Year, Month by Month gives the prices for each month on its own page. If you want the price of eggs the week someone was born, that is where to look.

The Numbers turns 1957 prices into today's money. We have a short version of that on our page about 1957 prices vs today.