Remember when a grocery receipt looked more like a quaint little novel than the scroll of doom it feels like today? Well, buckle up, because a single slip from 1997 is giving us all whiplash — and not just because prices have skyrocketed faster than Mercury in retrograde messing with your texts. Back then, you could walk out of the store with 122 items for a mere $155, and it barely made a dent in the household budget. Fast forward to now, and trying to buy the same stuff will cost you over three times that amount — and chew up nearly half the paycheck if you’re earning minimum wage. Talk about cosmic irony! As the world juggles crises from pandemics to geopolitical drama, it’s wild to think how the cost of living has ballooned while wages play catch-up at a snail’s pace. So, just how much harder is it to keep your fridge stocked today? Spoiler alert: it’s a rough ride, but don’t zone out yet — the numbers tell a story worth hearing. LEARN MORE.

A grocery receipt from 1997 reveals just how much prices have gone up since the late 90s.

A lot of things have happened since 1997, not least a world-changing economic crisis popping up about twice a decade since 2000, the 2008 financial crash, followed by the Great Recession, and then the global recession caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Now, the global geopolitical order is creaking under the weight of renewed aggression from Russia and Trump’s US, all while China eyes up Taiwan, and let’s not forget about the economic impact of climate change as well.

As millennials are fond of pointing out, just how many ‘once in a generation’ events can we possibly be expected to live through?

But anyway, back to 1997, one year after Marty from Back To The Future would travel to if it were made today.

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The cost of living is going up faster than wages (OsakaWayne Studios/Getty)

So, how much was a grocery bill? You may want to sit down.

TikToker Zoe Dippel revealed a receipt that she had found in her family home that was so long it looked like some sort of scroll from a fantasy film.

This included a staggering 122 items and came to just $155.

But how does this compare to wages? Let’s crunch some numbers, and fair warning, it’s not pretty.

According to the US census website, the median household income in 1997 was around $37,000 year, or around $3,083 a month.

So even if you’re buying 122 items every week, which seems unlikely, you’d get a monthly total of $620.

That’s about 20 percent of your monthly income, assuming you’re spending that much very week.

Zoe ran this through a comparison, though she pointed out that this was a rough comparison, as some items are no longer available.

Nonetheless, she found that in 2026, the closest equivalent of those 122 items would set you back $504.

It’s becoming harder and harder to get by (Malte Mueller/Getty)

Meanwhile, the median income as of 2024 is around $83,730, around $6,977 a month.

Multiplying that $504 for a weekly shop that’s $2,016 a month – just under 29 percent of those monthly earnings.

It’s also worth remembering as well that the incomes I’ve given here are representative of a median income; they don’t account for someone who was on minimum wage, so let’s look at that too.

In 1997, the federal minimum wage was $5.15 an hour, so if you worked a 40-hour week, that’s $824 a month, meaning that $155 is about 18 percent of your earnings.

Since 2009, the federal minimum wage has been $7.25, which is $1,160, so that $504 is 43 percent of your monthly earnings, nearly half.

Some of the individual items were particularly shocking.

In 1997, a jar of baby food cost just 55 cents, whereas now it’s nearly tripled to $1.57, while a jumbo pack of diapers has gone from $12.99 to $29.97.