Kristen Gyles | A trip to twenty-five years ago

Older people sometimes take liberties with me by suggesting I’m too young to know anything much of this country’s history, since it so vast and extends beyond anything I can personally recall. Well, thank God for the public record. I managed to get my hands on a copy of the March 26, 2000 edition of The Sunday Gleaner and had a grand time travelling back in time to shortly after I turned two years old.

Some things haven’t changed at all. The renowned Las May cartoon featured in the paper, showed a walking JPS meter with his arm outstretched towards a straight-nosed man with a big bag of ‘German Aid’ on his back. A man labelled ‘consumer’ appeared to be giving the JPS meter a good cussing: “Ai… De more yu get a de more yu dig out mi eye!”

I’m not sure what the average monthly JPS bill looked like in the year 2000 though, because The Sunday Classifieds featured quite a few jobs with wages that could hardly pay anyone’s JPS bill in 2025. One advertisement read “Accounting clerk, drivers, chef, handyman, bearer, receptionist, tele/oper., secretary, babysitter, live in/out helpers, office helper, gardener, hotel & factory workers, etc. Salary $2,500, $3,500 up. East Queen St. 922-6109.”

I will assume the diverse army of workers eventually hired on East Queen Street were being paid weekly since in 2000 the national minimum wage was $1,200 per week or $4,800 per month.

MORTGAGE LOAN AD

Equally as interesting was a mortgage loan advertisement which I suppose was printed courtesy of VMBS “The Mortgage Master”, which apparently wanted everyone to know they were offering mortgage loan rates as low as 17.75 per cent. Huh??? Imagine the ‘mortgage master’ offering ‘low’ mortgage rates at 17.75 per cent. Can’t imagine.

On the other hand, some prices have doubled, some tripled, some quadrupled and others have decoupled – like house prices. The real estate listings told an interesting story. One studio in Constant Spring was advertised with a selling price of $1.8 million and one two-bedroom townhouse in Acadia was being sold for $3.5 million. A two-bedroom property in Brown’s Town, St Ann, was being sold for $2.6 million and all of five acres in Westmoreland were being sold for $800,000.

Did those pre-historic people from the year 2000 consider that house prices could grow tenfold in 25 years? Did they even think about it? The real question is, if the price of a studio in Constant Spring was $1.8 million in 2000 and the price of a studio in Constant Spring is $18 million today, will a studio in Constant Spring cost $180 million by 2050? Can’t imagine.

Funny enough, this uncanny phenomenon is less observed with rental properties. A two-bedroom apartment in Oaklands, Kingston, was being rented for $25,000 per month in March 2000, and you could rent a studio in Norbrook with $18,000. One two-bedroom house in Passage Fort was being rented for $14,000 monthly and a two-bedroom house in West Cumberland, Portmore, was being rented for $13,500.

After making a deposit on your desired property, you could swing by Kingston Industrial Garage Limited and pick up a four-piece sofa set for $36,999 cash.

PRETTY INTERESTING

It is also pretty interesting to consider that a Big Burger Meal at Mother’s, which looks like it consisted of a burger, fries and soda, costed $109. In today’s price-inflated Jamaica, $1,090 sounds more realistic. Nine dollars are no longer worth the time you take to dig through your purse or wallet to find it – certainly not when it is $1 short of an ice mint.

What else? The national annual budget which now exceeds $1 trillion, was a mere $167 billion for the 2000/01 fiscal year.

On another note, even I remember those formidable and enduring Nokia phones. ‘Cellular King’ says they specialise in “connecting you throughout the year 2000 and crushing prices along the way”. You could get a Nokia 5120 originally priced at $10,950 (if you say so, Cellular King…) for only $2,500 and you could get other digital phones for as low as $595. Today, there is no such thing as ‘digital phones’. Phones are digital. Poor Cellular King.

Maybe, in 2050 we will be around to see the young people of the day buying cellphones for millions of dollars and buying one patty for $2,000. Maybe a copy of The Sunday Gleaner, which costed $27 in March 2000, and which costs $195 now, will cost you a kidney. Who knows? Isn’t it weird how this money thing works?

Kristen Gyles is a free-thinking public affairs opinionator. Send feedback to kristengyles@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com