The high cost of groceries isn't new. Consider this 1974 shopping trip.
- - The high cost of groceries isn't new. Consider this 1974 shopping trip.
Joyce HarveyNovember 10, 2025 at 4:48 AM
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“Grocery prices of yore not funny now,” was the title of an article appearing on the front page of the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette Nov. 19, 1974. This 50-year-old “Thanksgiving story” written by Mike Staton caught this writer’s attention and had to be shared. Today, shoppers certainly are still complaining about grocery prices just as Mrs. Ellen Fleming was 50 years ago.
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Mrs. Fleming lived at 659 King Street and had gone to Dick Bininger’s IGA at 518 E. Main St. because it was conveniently located nearby. Before this shopping trip, she had found “an old wrinkled, yellowed grocery list/receipt from about 1910 left in a book in the attic.” It had been used as a bookmark and forgotten.
Customer Mrs. Ellen Fleming was shown talking with Dick Bininger in this photo from the Eagle-Gazette on Nov. 19, 1974. They were comparing the cost of groceries 60 years earlier to the cost in 1974. They were in Bininger's IGA at 518 E. Main Street.
It showed purchases on a trip to the grocery then were: 3 lbs. coffee 63 cents, 2 lbs. butter 72 cents, peck of potatoes 15 cents, 1 Rinso 10 cents, Argo starch 10 cents, 3 lbs. salt 10 cents, 1 head lettuce 7 cents, 2 bars of Fels Naphtha soap 10 cents, 2 bars of Ivory soap 11 cents, and 2 toilet tissues 10 cents. The cost for those groceries with multiple purchases of a few items was a total of $2.55.
Just for “fun,” Mr. Bininger then found the same or similar items on his shelves and added them up at the then “current” 1974 prices. His total was $10.81.
It is interesting to note that the story concluded with Mrs. Fleming saying that though economic conditions were depressive to her in 1974, she believed “the struggle for life will never be as turbulent as in the Great Depression of the 1930s.”
Dick Bininger opened his first grocery store in 1946 in this building on the NE corner of Fifth and Maple Streets. In 1962 he moved into a building at 518 E. Main Street.
Some Lancaster readers may remember Dick Bininger’s grocery at 518 E. Main St., but fewer readers will remember his first grocery was on the NE corner of Fifth Ave. and Maple St. He opened there in 1946, then enlarged and remodeled the building in 1957.
Meanwhile, Johnny Showalter Motors had purchased property at 518 E. Main St. in 1952, and opened a new “automobile sales and service center” on the site. After 33 years in business, Showalter closed his business in 1962, and Dick Bininger purchased the building.
Bininger remodeled his “new” building, and opened a “new gigantic I.G.A. Foodliner” on June 27, 1962. It was was described as “three times larger than the market where he had been located for the past 16 1/2 years. Four years later he added a 2,500 sq. ft. addition to the rear, and purchased property to the east for a large parking area.
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Dick Bininger retired in 1975, and the grocery was sold to Paul Hickman and John Little. It operated as “John’s Market,” until the grocery’s stock and equipment was sold at auction in 1982. The building returned to the automobile business in 1985 when it became “Murray’s Auto Parts.” Today, it is NAPA Auto Parts, and passersby would never guess that 63 years ago it was the “new, biggest and best” grocery store in Lancaster.
For “fun,” readers can go to a grocery store and add the prices of items on the shelves today that are similar to the items Bininger added up in 1974 to see what the total cost would be today!
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: High cost of groceries isn't new, as a 1974 shopping trip shows.
Source: “AOL Money”
