Inflation

Carter over at M. Carter Brown posted up a copy of May 1986 Frontline Magazine he scanned recently. Things have changed. Many for the better but looking and reading the articles, I bet the guys were having a heck of a lot of fun. I didn't start playing until a few years after this, but the pictures looked familiar enough. Some of the most interesting pages were the advertisings for me. Even back when I first started playing and buying the odd paintball magazine, I probably spent just as much time looking over the ads as I did the articles. I have a feeling most new players still do this, only today they are looking at what's available on the internet (no wonder print media is dying).

Being a field owner, the ads by other fields (in May 1986) caught my eye right away of course. For about $25 you could play for several hours including a pump action marker, camo, goggles (not like today's goggles of course) and included 2 to 3 tubes of paint and a couple of CO2's (12 gm.) . The tubes of paint held 10 balls of course. Additional paintballs, for those who wanted to go hog wild, could be purchased for about 15 cents each (or $1.50/tube). 40 cents for an additional co2 cartridge, which you would probably need for every 1.5 to 2 tubes of paint.

So I wanted to see what $25 in 1986 compared to in 2011 and googled an inflation calculator to find out. The answers varies slightly, depending on what indexes are being used in the calculation, but the answer is that $25 in 1986, is almost exactly double, or $50, today. I wonder if the average player today would be satisfied if they received a pump gun, 30 paintballs and 2 CO2 cartridges for $50? Of course they might be if paintball was in its infancy, pump guns were the only thing available, and the guy that shot over 50 paintballs in a day was considered an extremist. Heck, if they didn't know any better, players might be quite happy to fork over $50 and shoot 30 paintballs in a 3-4 hour session. They were then.