The price of Christmas past: £599 for a VHS recorder

Hilary Osborne

Christmas gifts may seem to get more expensive each year, but believe it or not, many of them have not.

A flick through the 1982 Boots Christmas catalogue shows how much the cost of some presents has fallen over the past 30 years – largely the result of China’s emergence as a manufacturing superpower and advances in technology which have slashed production costs.

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Thirty-two years ago – when the UK had just fought and won the Falklands war, ET was the most popular film, and Renée and Renato had the Christmas No 1 – Boots was recommending a Braun hand-blender, complete with mixing bowl, as an ideal gift. Anyone tempted would have had to hand over £9.95.

According to the Office for National Statistics, prices are now 3.11 times higher now than in Christmas 1982, adjusted for inflation as measured by the Retail Prices Index. That would make the blender worth £31 today, but this year the equivalent model costs £17.99 in Currys.

Late 1982 was a difficult time in the UK. Unemployment was running at more than 10% and some serious money was needed to buy the most desirable products in the catalogue.

The most expensive item on offer was a Ferguson VHS video recorder “offering video programmability and stereo capability” for £599 – equal to £1,863 today. With the average weekly wage in 1982 only £136.50, the video player cost a month’s pay. Today, a Panasonic DVD recorder costs about £250, about half the average weekly wage of £483, while a simple DVD player can be less than £30.

In the early 1980s, China was only just opening up to business, and although manufacturing jobs were already being lost in the UK, Ferguson’s products were still made in Britain.

Paul O’Donnell, of the Manufacturing and Technologies Association, said: “The big trend over the last 30 years has been the globalisation of manufacturing. Production that would have been done in the UK, Europe or North America has moved to the far east. That started taking prices down and it really got turbo-charged in the 90s.”

Toy prices have tumbled. In the Boots catalogue, a Cindico Toy Traveller – a play buggy – was £9.50 (equal to £29.25 today), while Pass Me! – 1982’s version of Bop It – was £19.95 (£61.43). The Casdon cash register was £11.95 (£37) but in 2014 a fancier version is £15. The company, which used to produce toys in a Blackpool factory, now sources them from east Asia.

Technology has had a huge impact. In 1982, a Speak and Spell, complete with American accent, cost £33.95 (£106). Today it exists only as a free Android app.

Some must-have gifts from back then are now obsolete, such as audio tapes on which you might have recorded the Christmas charts, and video tapes handy for saving The Two Ronnies Christmas Special.

Not everything is cheaper. Back then men who bought their “sex appeal” over the counter – as a giftbox of talc and aftershave – paid £5.40, equal to £16 today and therefore cheaper than their current equivalent.

And the latest video consoles are much of a muchness. The Atari video computer system was £94.95 (£295), while the Mattel Intellivision video computer system was a whopping £149.95 (£466). This year, Boots is charging £350 for a Playstation 4 and £400 for the XBox One with a game.