The amazing American nickel candy bar


Something that I keep noticing when I'm looking at historic photos is that a lot of things sold for a nickel, and they did so for a very long time, like candy bars. This image, which I found on the Duke University website ROAD (Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions) is from 1935, and that Jack Dempsey candy bar was a nickel. Note the comparison to a 10-cent bar on the label, but I've never seen a 10-cent bar!

I wasn't alive in 1935, but I was thirty years later, in the 1960s and as a kid, I remember that you could still get a candy bar for a nickel. Maybe not as large as a Jack Dempsey bar, but still a good-sized candy bar. They didn't really start getting smaller, and then more expensive, until the early 1970s. I definitely remember people complaining about it. The price of gas went up, too!

But here's what's amazing me, that you could buy a candy bar for a nickel in the '30s, '40s, '50s, and '60s, while everything else got more expensive, like cars, houses, you name it. I really have no answer for this, unless the technology of making candy bars got less expensive, like it did for calculators and computers.

It was done, as you'd might expect, in a sneaky way by making the candy bars smaller and smaller over the years. People just didn't notice the same way they would have noticed if the price had suddenly jumped to six cents or seven cents! But it was such a slow process of "downsizing" that when candy bars started to get so much smaller that the average person could see it, that most people noticed. By the way, my favorite candy bar cheated it by being braided. I'm not kidding - it was a neat trick that made the bar look bigger in the package, but actually there were a lot of holes. It was called a "Marathon Bar". Hang on, and I'll see if I can find a pic for you. Here ya go:


After that, as prices went up and up in the 1970s, it just got to a point where there were no more tricks, and candy bars not only went up to a dime (!) but remained smaller. This kind of thing still goes on, the most recent trick being candy bars that went from square corners to rounded corners. That adds up, you know! And people get used to it, the way that they got used to the trick Coca-Cola used after the price of sugar went up around World War I - they pinched the middle of the bottle so that they could put let product in it, but the bottle was still the same height.

Now I'm hungry for some chocolate! I wonder if I can find a Jack Dempsey bar? It's a knockout!

Image from the Duke University Library Digital Collections.
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