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Comment by zahlman | Hacker News Reader

>indicates that João A. Fernandes is paid 15$000 (15 Portuguese escudos) per hour

From the linked Wikipedia article, the escudo was replaced with the Euro in 2002, at a rate of about 200 escudos to the Euro. Seems like they had quite a bit of inflation in those three or so decades.

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I was intrigued by the value so did some research.

I would guess the 15$/hour value was chosen to approximate an average gross salary. The annualized payment would be 31200$[1] and it seems the average annual salary was around 30359$.

Updated to 2022 values the annual gross pay would be 10033€ [3], current average annual gross salary is 20483€ [4].

[1] 15$ * 2080 hours [2] https://www.repository.utl.pt/bitstream/10400.5/9819/1/ee-ja... [3] https://www.ine.pt/xportal/xmain?xpid=INE&xpgid=ipc&xlang=en [4] https://www.pordata.pt/pt/estatisticas/salarios-e-pensoes/sa...

15 escudos was roughly 7 cents of Euro in those days. You could buy one chewing gum with that kind of money. An expresso coffee would cost 50 escudos on the turn of the century.

There was: https://www.inflationtool.com/rates/portugal/historical?utm_...

I have heard a few stories about those times in the 70s and 80s where people were selling their properties and putting the money in the bank which was paying 20% interest.

A bitter lesson on the difference between the nominal Vs real value of money rapidly ensued.

I'm portuguese and there's an oddity in either this chart or my memory.

When we transitioned to the euro it seemed most shops straight up converted from escudo to eurocent. So if something cost 50 escudos it would cost 50 cents. I was a teen at the time so I remember having to pay double for breakfast and arcade coinop games and people blaming the inflation for the doubled price of stuff. Yet the chart doesn't represent this. I know the price of electronics for example wasn't doubled so I wasn't expect a 100% inflation rate or anything, but I still feels it should've been higher than 4%.

Uh 3 years of 22% inflation (give or take) doubles prices. When you're a young kid it sure would seem like everything got twice as expensive really fast, especially since most stores and manufacturers aren't raising prices every week to track inflation.

If I estimate the 10-ish years of 20% +/- 3% that's around 7x which I can't imagine.

They were talking about 2002 when the Euro was introduced and "it felt like" prices doubled overnight. At the time (as you can see in the chart) inflation was below 4% per year.

Ditto in Spanish with the former currency, the peseta.

1 euro = 166 PTS, 6 euro ~ 1000 PTS, the basic banknote.

Guess what happened. Exactly. Bread costing 100 PTS began to cost... 166, 1 euro.

Bread didn’t go up 66% overnight.

It did go up 66%… but it took more than 15 years: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/6407661.pdf

In some places, it did over a year.

In your mind :-)

Tell that to lots of local shops there on what happened between 2002 and 2005 :)

And, of course, bars.

We were talking about bread. And "between 2002 and 2005" is somewhat longer than "over a year".

It didn't happed specifically with bread, as other comment exposed, but it happened with other products, specially in bars, cafés, and restaurants.

On the other hand, inflation affected different products in different ways. I remember how in January 1st 2002 a small bag of Ruffles Jamón costed €0.15 in a kiosk and now it's around €0.50 (or even more) in same places (and now contains less product and more air), and I doubt any other product that are nearly 300% percent inflation since 2002 (outside homes sadly)

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