Yahoo Finance Celebrating 40 years of the £1 coin and how money has changed since
The £1 coin was first launched 40 years ago – on 21 April 1983. At the time, the Royal Mint said each of the coins would last 40 years or more. Unfortunately, none of them got the chance, because forgers doomed the round pound to an early demise.
By the time they were replaced by the 12-sided coin in 2017, an estimated one in 30 were fake. The coin itself isn’t the only thing to have transformed in the past 40 years. Inflation and changing shopping habits mean we occupy a wildly different world of spending now.
Back in 1983, the vast majority of people were completely unaware of online shopping. There were one or two experimental stores, but until the mid 1990s they were only used by the dedicated computing enthusiast.
Now online sales make up over a quarter of everything we buy. Mind you, even if we’d been keen to embrace the online shopping trend back in 1983, we might have found it more difficult without a debit card – which only arrived in the UK in 1987.
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It meant the high street ruled. Alongside huge regional department stores, we saw Woolworths, C&A, Chelsea Girl and BHS drawing the Saturday crowds – although the doors were still firmly shut on Sundays. The big supermarkets were already well established too, but Sainsbury’s led the pack – followed by the Co-Op.
The big shop back then set us back £8.54 per person each week – a figure that has since hit £26.38. It’s easy to see how it all adds up when you consider that the average loaf cost 38p in 1983 – compared with £1.38 today.
Our food favourites have changed significantly over the years too. Back then big Sainsbury’s announcements included the exciting day that pepperoni pizza was first available in store, and such was the overwhelming popularity of Cinzano and lemonade that vermouth was added to the ONS shopping basket.
Beyond the supermarket, we had long embraced fast food, and McDonalds had opened it’s 100th restaurant in the UK. The prices were strikingly different of course, with a Big Mac setting you back just 89p. The menu was a bit different too, because while you could snap up a fillet-o-fish, you’d have to wait another year for the chicken nugget to arrive.
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Email had been around for more than a decade, but had yet to catch on in any meaningful way. Instead, we stuck with snail mail, and paid just 16p for a first-class stamp.
Compare that to today when you’ll fork out £1.10 for one. It’s no wonder most people have given up almost entirely on letter sending in favour of the quicker and cheaper alternatives.
It wasn’t just the everyday expenses which were dramatically different in 1983. Back when the £1 coin arrived on the scene, the average house cost just £27,386 – where as now the average is £290,000.
Property prices have risen far faster than inflation overall. Compared to 40 years ago, houses cost over times more today – whereas £1 in 1983 only had the spending power of £3.15 today.
Of course, given how prices have changed, it’s no wonder that wages have risen significantly to cover the costs. Back then, the average pay for men was £145.70 a week. Now it averages £630 a week.
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But while the face of inflation and shopping has changed dramatically, some things endure, and one icon of 1983 is still going strong today. The Mario Bros made their debut 40 years ago, and as anyone who has been anywhere near a cinema recently knows, they’re still packing in the fans all these years later.
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