Carrefour’s 1973 prices and the trap of comparing them

Carrefour in 1973: DYC at 82 cents and salaries of 4.000 pesetas

A 1973 Carrefour price leaflet —137 pesetas for a bottle of DYC, 82 cents at the exchange rate— resurfaces every so often as evidence for a nostalgia that never quite adds up. The reasoning seems unbeatable: if back then you could buy for coins what today costs a coffee, something has broken along the way. The trap is on the other side of the receipt. With a salary that hovered around 4.000 pesetas a month in many sectors, that bottle swallowed more than 3% of a month’s pay. Comparing Carrefour’s 1973 prices with today’s only holds up if you ignore the denominator.

The brand that was never as Spanish as it seemed

Before getting into figures, it is worth clearing up a recurring misunderstanding: neither Pryca nor Continente was born as a homegrown chain. Pryca had been a Carrefour brand since its founding, and Continente belonged to the French group Promodès. The deal that in 2000 unified everything under the Carrefour name was not a foreigner’s takeover of a national company, but the merger of two French giants, driven — according to accounts circulating within the French government itself — by the aim of stopping Walmart. The brand survived in Portugal: there Sonae took full control in 2004 and kept the Continente name.

The curiosity deserves a line. The Pryca in Madrid could already be seen in 1966 in the film La ciudad no es para mí, with bags bearing the logo outside the supermarket. The façade can be made out at minute 44:03.

The calculation that falls apart on its own

Here comes the star argument: divide those prices by four to adapt them to today’s mileurismo (living on around €1,000 a month) and find that, in reality, everything was much more expensive. A kilo of rice or olive oil, converted, cost a fortune. The exercise has a basic problem: it compares a 1973 price with a salary that is not from 1973 and, above all, it forgets inflation. The average annual salary in 1974 stands at 264.000 pesetas in the statistics used, and the tax burden on payrolls was then far lower than it is today.

The 1974 breakdown by sector helps show it. The average hourly wage ranged from 155 pesetas in banking to 61 in food, passing through 93 in metalworking or 70 in construction. These are figures excluding apprentices and graduates, and they explain why the aggregate salary looks nothing like the one painted by nostalgia or by demagoguery.

• Banking: 155 pesetas/hour
• Coal mining: 138 pesetas/hour
• Electricity, gas and water: 120 pesetas/hour
• Metalworking: 93 pesetas/hour
• Construction: 70 pesetas/hour
• Textile industry: 63 pesetas/hour
• Food, drink and tobacco: 61 pesetas/hour

Fixed mortgage payments and the silent tax that was inflation

There is a factor that no price table captures and that reorders the whole debate: between 1973 and the end of the decade, inflation was above 10% for several years, with peaks reaching 15%. Anyone who crossed a 1973 price with a 1978 salary was mixing two different worlds. Official prices have multiplied by 19 since then, accumulating that effect over half a century.

That same mechanism explains the story of old mortgages. The payments were fixed. With runaway inflation, an instalment that at signing devoured half a salary became a laughably small bill in barely four years. It was not financial magic: it was the corrosive power of prices working in the debtor’s favour. There is the real case of a 112 m² flat in Alcalá de Henares, bought off-plan in July 1977 for 2.140.000 pesetas —about 12.000 euros— and financed with a ten-year mortgage, paid with the sole salary of a high school teacher. The full calculation, item by item, leaves a difference with today that is hard to swallow.

Outer-city workers, then and now

The housing contrast has its own fine print. Workers back then did not live in the centre either. Madrid’s outskirts began almost at Plaza de España, and families squeezed into dormitory suburbs. The difference is not that people used to live in the centre: it is how far those outskirts reach today, already stretching to Getafe or Segarro, and at what price.

The picture is completed by regional differences. While in Mallorca, in the middle of the tourism boom, a hospitality assistant earned 8.000 pesetas with accommodation, laundry and meals included, in rural areas of much of the south people grew up in houses without electricity or a bathroom. It was several countries within one country, and no hypermarket leaflet can fix that picture.

The figure that unsettles

The current average salary is around 27.000 euros a year, and two-thirds of workers earn less than 22.000. The SMI (Spain’s national minimum wage), depending on whether it is paid in twelve or fourteen instalments, ranges between 1.134 and 1.323 euros. Since 2011, moreover, wages stopped being tied to the IPC (Spain’s consumer price index). With that framework, nostalgia for DYC at 137 pesetas does not stand up to scrutiny, but neither does the opposite narrative: the urban purchasing power of that era was much greater than today’s for anyone with a permanent job. Both things are true. Choosing only one is cheating.