A Generational Moment

A person who works on movies and television shows posted a Warner Brothers lunch menu from 1941 to Twitter the other day:

(Click to enlarge, where I hope it will be large enough to read.)

It provides a glimpse of a lot of gag-worthy food (peanut butter and baked ham... chop suey sundae… jellied chicken broth), but the thing that emerged from the comments was even more startling to me. It was a kind of generational shock from the people who didn't understand the prices.

I realize the menu's prices generally don't include decimal points, dollar signs, or cent signs, but people, it's 1941. The menu is for lunch. The prices are clearly in cents. 

Oddly, there are a handful of things listed as 1.00: a cold raw Virginia ham or turkey sandwich with potato salad and imported natural goose liver (while even caviar or a tenderloin steak are listed at 95 cents). Those three one-dollar items are hard to spot, though, so I can see why they could be missed when a reader was trying to figure out what the other numbers mean. But even without those 1.00s, anyone with an understanding of how prices have changed over time would realize this menu is generally listing the food in cents.

Which leads me to believe the people who don't grasp that are pretty young and can't believe food ever cost that little. 

There was one other response to the Warner Brothers menu that's worth reporting. Cartoonist Ruben Bolling (Tom the Dancing Bug) posted the Walt Disney menu from the same time period:

Disney didn't used decimal points to mark their cent-based prices, either. Two of their steaks were $1.25, but their other foods seem to have been more affordable, plus they had a small selection of Mexican food on Thursdays.