Five cents for the newspaper

Five cents, Ten cents for a newspaper? Of course, years ago, that’s what it was. And not that long ago either. I remember when I was a kid, when I was a paper boy the newspaper was five cents for a daily paper. I delivered the Long Island Press for a few years.

It was five cents a day for the dailies and 30 cents for the Sunday paper – 60 cents for the 7 day week!

This paper from 1969 shows the price of 5 cents, so I guess that was the price for everyone, not just subscribers.

I used to have to “collect,” which is going around and getting paid from customers weekly. I had a little green book, which I think is still at my parents’ house somewhere, and I used to go around the block collecting.

At one point the Sunday paper went up to 35 cents, the dailies were still five cents – so it was 65 cents for the week! Today newspapers are $3.00 for the daily and I’ve seen up to $8.00 for the Sunday paper! They are much less if you subscribe and have it delivered.


Anyway, I went around collecting one time, and one customer yelled at me because the paper went up from 60 cents to 65 cents for the week. He was upset over the nickel. He said no one told him about the rise in price. I just shrugged, but I’m sure the Press put the info on their front page as they usually do, publishing in a box or something to inform readers of the change.

Now you can’t even get a candy bar for 65 cents.

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