The Cost to Fill Up in ’94 vs. the Cost Now
The other day, I pumped about half a tank of gas into my old muscle car, which cost me about twice as much as it did when I bought the car back in 1994. Back then, the cost of a gallon of gas was about $1.10 – and back then, I was a young guy without a lot of money to spend on gas, but I could still afford to regularly fill up the old muscle car’s tank because it only cost me about $20 to do that, back then.
Today, it costs about $90 to fill up that same tank and it’s much harder to afford that, even though I ought to be able to afford more today rather than back then, since I’m more financially secure after thirty-plus years of working than I was back then, when I’d just begun working.
Something has changed – and it is more than just what people refer to as “inflation.”
If you plug the $1.10 per gallon cost of gas back in ’94 into the inflation calculator the government makes available – see here – you get an “inflation adjusted” 2026 figure of $2.48 per gallon. This is off by about $1.50 per gallon in my area, where regular unleaded costs about $4 per gallon as of yesterday.
It’s more than just that, though.
If you are old enough to remember what other things cost – and what you had available to spend – back in the ’90s, then you know it is not just “inflation” (or the cost of gas) that’s made things seem more expensive by dint of us needing to have more dollars to buy the same things today than we needed to buy those things (like gas) back in the ’90s.
I remember what I was earning, back then. It was not much – and yet, I had enough coming in to be able to afford to both buy the old muscle car (which was then just an old car, admittedly, rather than the “classic” it is now) as well as fill it up regularly and pay the rent/mortgage I had to pay back in those days, plus all of the other expenses – such as for food and utilities and so on – that everyone has to pay who isn’t homeless or a government dole-receiver. I was able to afford all that, as a young guy just starting out. Here I am, 30-something years older and even without having to pay one of the major expenses I was paying back then – the rent/mortgage, because I now nominally “own” the home I still have to pay rent to the government in order to not be evicted from – and it is much more difficult for me to fill-up the old muscle car’s tank because I have fewer actual dollars to buy the gas with.
This is the oft-unspoken other side of the “inflation” coin. It is that us Deplorables – the people who were once able to afford to live pretty well on income that defined working class or lower middle class are finding it a lot tougher to just live. To be able to comfortably afford the necessities. Forget the luxuries, such as gassing up an old muscle car.
I think the people who are today the age I was back in the early ’90s are understandably enraged for exactly this reason. People my age – GenX’ers – and the generations before us – were for the most part able to get a leg up. It is why I still have an old muscle car, even though I don’t drive it as often anymore because it costs so much to fill it up. If I had to come up with the roughly $2,000 it apparently now costs to rent a place each month – or the $400k it apparently costs to buy an average single family home now – I could not afford it. I doubt I’d ever get a leg up, if I were today the age I was, back then.
This is the nut of it, I think.
The double tap of “inflation” and less dollars (for most of us) to compensate for “inflation.” There are also peripheral unhelpful factors, too – such as the McMansioning of most areas such that even the older, modestly sized houses that were built many decades ago that remain in the same area have increased in “value” absurdly – but no less really. My old house in Northern Va – the one I bought for around $155k back in the ’90s – is now a $600k house. I could not afford that house today – even if the price were cut in half.
Forget back then.
The whole thing is maddening, saddening and alarming – because it is likely to lead to something much worse, riding the wave of understandable fury of the Youth who understand they’ve been sorely gypped but do not understand why.
Or by whom.
https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2026/04/18/the-cost-to-fill-up-in-94-vs-the-cost-now