Cards Per Hour

I'm not a mathematician, statistician, or economist, so I don't know how valid or accurate this is. But I've always wondered what year was the most economical to buy cards. So I did some digging around.

Here's my premise: I will compare the cost of a single card (pack price divided by cards per pack) with the federal minimum wage for that particular year. I can then determine how many baseball cards you could buy with an hours worth of work at the minimum wage.

We can then look year by year and find the year that would give you the most cards per hour.

From 1952 all the way until 1972, cards were a penny each. The amount of gum you got went down as the pack sizes increased, but it was a penny per card. In 1973, the price per pack jumped to 15 cents for 10 cards, and the penny a card price was gone forever. From that point on, the price and/or the cards per pack changed pretty regularly.

As I was hunting around for retail pack prices, I hit a wall. I couldn't find any retail pack prices for the years 1995 - 2006. If any of you have a source for that information, I'd love to see it. I don't like having my chart full of ??????.

According to what I found, the best year to buy cards would have been.....



....1979! You could get a whopping 174 cards with one hour's work at $2.90 per hour. That's right. Work an hour and you've earned enough to buy 174 beauties like these.









And the 1979 Topps Cubs didn't have a single card that was airbrushed!

In 1979 the minimum wage had just gone up, but Topps was still charging 20 cents for a pack of 12 cards. And this was at a time when Topps was still the only game in town. Fleer and Donruss were still two years away. I was a senior in high school in 1979, and I was working part time in a minimum wage job, but I wasn't buying wax anymore. Too bad for me!

Now compare the 1979 number with today's, in which you can get 44 cards for an hours work. That's only a fourth of what you could get in 1979. And in 1979 you still got gum! Of course, in 1979 you didn't have any of the inserts or the glossy cards, you just had base cards on cardboard. But the question has to be asked: Is the chance of getting that autograph on a sticker or swatch of jersey worth paying four times as much for the pack?

Want to guess what my answer is?

Here's the complete chart, from 1952 to 2010. If you see that I've got something wrong, or if you have any of the retail prices that I'm missing, leave a comment and I'll edit the chart.

Year	Minimum wage	Cost Per Card	Cards Per Hour
1952	$0.75	$0.01	75
1953	$0.75	$0.01	75
1954	$0.75	$0.01	75
1955	$0.75	$0.01	75
1956	$1.00	$0.01	100
1957	$1.00	$0.01	100
1958	$1.00	$0.01	100
1959	$1.00	$0.01	100
1960	$1.00	$0.01	100
1961	$1.15	$0.01	115
1962	$1.15	$0.01	115
1963	$1.25	$0.01	125
1964	$1.25	$0.01	125
1965	$1.25	$0.01	125
1966	$1.25	$0.01	125
1967	$1.40	$0.01	140
1968	$1.60	$0.01	160
1969	$1.60	$0.01	160
1970	$1.60	$0.01	160
1971	$1.60	$0.01	160
1972	$1.60	$0.01	160
1973	$1.60	$0.015	107
1974	$2.00	$0.019	107
1975	$2.10	$0.015	140
1976	$2.30	$0.015	153
1977	$2.30	$0.015	153
1978	$2.65	$0.017	159
1979	$2.90	$0.017	174
1980	$3.10	$0.021	149
1981	$3.35	$0.020	168
1982	$3.35	$0.020	168
1983	$3.35	$0.020	168
1984	$3.35	$0.020	168
1985	$3.35	$0.023	144
1986	$3.35	$0.023	144
1987	$3.35	$0.024	142
1988	$3.35	$0.027	126
1989	$3.35	$0.030	112
1990	$3.80	$0.031	122
1991	$4.25	$0.033	128
1992	$4.25	$0.037	116
1993	$4.25	$0.046	92
1994	$4.25	$0.066	65
1995	$4.25	????
1996	$4.75	????
1997	$5.15	????
1998	$5.15	????
1999	$5.15	????
2000	$5.15	????
2001	$5.15	????
2002	$5.15	????
2003	$5.15	????
2004	$5.15	????
2005	$5.15	????
2006	$5.15	????
2007	$5.85	$0.199	29
2008	$6.55	$0.199	33
2009	$7.25	$0.166	44
2010	$7.25	$0.166	44