Price of a Norton

[johnnyboy-wonder57]

Quote Bike magazine November 2011
"In 1971, a Norton Commando made 60bhp and did 116mph. It cost £595.  That's the equivalent of £6771 today, when the all new Commando makes 27% more power & goes 10% faster, but costs more than twice as much!
Price £13,995!
New Norton 961 twin, 128mph, 82bhp,
£1 in 1971, is therefore equivalent in value to £11:38 pounds today!
So as you can see falling wages, increases in fuel duty, Vat & Energy costs, all add up to to a package which will obviously lead the UK, out of the mire & into a more prosperous future with a guaranteed economic recovery @ the end of it!
If a Nation does not control Energy prices, allows successive Governments to increase duty & taxes, has restrictive Commercial rates, adds stealth taxes to the mix, compulsory purchases & destroys industrial infra-structure, insists on Green taxes and astronomical insurance costs. plus ludicrous EU restrictions then.....ships out scrap metal to China buy the container load.  There will come a point where it will be cheaper to build your own machine from scratch @ home them buy one mass produced!

I would like to see how a costings are worked out for the manufacture of new machine/motorcycle in the UK today, especially since so much of it is probably computerised & how come the inefficient systems of 40 years ago produced a machine, mainly by hand @ less than half the cost of today!  Economic recovery my a***!

Seriously the cost of new bikes is debilitating against other forms of transport & you can pay more road tax too!



Cheers
John

JBW

[Rex]

I wouldn't know, I don't think I've ever bought a bike less than ten years old, though most have been (much) older...

What intrigues/worries me is that real jobs (ie jobs producing or making things) continues to dwindle, the percentage of the population working also continues to fall, and yet the UK still allows
the waifs and strays of the world to settle without a second thought.


(As if we haven't got enough scrounging chavs of our own already.... )

[yebbut]

yet the UK still allows
the waifs and strays of the world to settle without a second thought.
 

If that bothers you look into how much money they are sending out of this country to their relatives abroad, its  bloody staggering, yet not that long ago we were restricted to how much streling currency we could take on holiday.

Thats apart from where that money actually derives from here..........................

[R]

Quote Bike magazine November 2011
"It cost £595.  ]That's the equivalent of £6771 today

Where did someone get that conversion from I wonder ?
If you look at wages then and now, and the cost of houses then and now, some would suggest that the modern equivalent is grossly inadequate.

600 quid in 1971 would be a fair bits of a years wages ?
£6771 today is not much of a years wages

??

[Rex]

No, it's clearly rubbish.
£6771 is roughly 20-25% of an average wage now, so that would make the £595 about £2400-3000 quid a year.
I remember when GPs (early 70s) reached £2000 a year, and that was considered scandalously high at the time.
The conversion's gone wrong somewhere.

[johnnyboy-wonder57]

Guys,
I was only quoting what Bike magazine had written;
Aside from the thread hijacking views on Global population shifts & impacts, a further financial opinion states from an independent site; http://www.measuringworth.com/indicator.php
Current data is only available till 2009. In 2009, £595.00 from 1971 is worth £6,270.00 using the retail price index! This compares like for like items: The price of a motorcycle is an example of this!
£11,200.00 using average earnings! This compares how affordable the product is compared to average earnings, (not quoted in Bike magazine); Therefore you would have to be earning £22,400 net annually for the new Commando to cost half of your annual wage, this therefore illustrates affordability to the average punter!

Having said that Average earnings can be very misleading, with wages falling rapidly and more and more people falling into the less than £16,000 annually category the current £26,000 plus figure, £22,000 in real terms after tax is fairly meaningless for many people the bottom 1% is around £ 6,600, the bottom  25% in the UK earn less than £11,500, the median, (middle) is around £16,700 around & the top 1%  over £155,000 plus, what makes it worse is a larger and larger % of the population are only working part-time hours!

So it still  surely illustrates that the New Commando is more costly than an old commando of 40 years ago!



Cheers



John


JBW

[statik]

My wages in 1971 was £260.00 a year for working in a sheet metal shop in Plumstead.  I walked into a job by knocking on doors at a factory estate and asking for work.  Now all the doors have gone.  The old boss retired a few years ago and couldn't even sell the buisiness so shut it down. 

Did I mention I worked 27 hours a day and lived in a shoe box.  Tell that to the kids of today and they won't believe you.   

My first Commando cost me £325.00 (ish) in 1976. 

[johnnyboy-wonder57]

Now corrected to the price of a new Norton;
Correction you would have to be earning £27,990 net, for a new Commando to be equal to 50% of your wages.

From a site linked to the Financial Times it lists the average salary in 1971 as £ 2,003.88, unfortunately 1971 was the year the UK became decimalised so data sources are in old & New currency, with regards to the cost of some items, are confusing, as a School kid I was told that there was a  conversion of 2d to 1p, (I believe lost people monetary value as the old £ had 240d), in it, 1970 would have been a better time to use as an example!

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1633409/Historic-inflation
1971,  £595 =  £6,771.10;  2011
The cost of commodities such as houses, cannot be used  as a good indicator of value change, when you get widening differentials in earnings & when somebody with too much money paid £1 million for a cupboard flat in London in the 1980s, the excesses of the property boom started. My father bought a semi-detached new build house in Lancashire for £2,000 in 1960, he was an Electrician and it was 200 times his weekly salary, if you earn £500 net in 2011 and multiply it up by 200, you get £100,000, houses are now therefore likely to be 400 x the weekly salary  this @ least, the more money that goes into mortgages the less is being spent elsewhere so high house prices further damage weak economies & eventually cause recession & unemployment.


John


JBW

[johnnyboy-wonder57]

Statik,

Was that net? R U sure this wasn't for a month?  If its true, you were earning  between a seventh and an eighth of the average wage!

Cheers
John

JBW

[Rex]

From a site linked to the Financial Times it lists the average salary in 1971 as £ 2,003.88,

Sorry, I don't believe that, either. I started work as an apprentice in 1972, and was given a table of the yearly pay increments up to Craftsman, and he was "only" on about thirty quid a week. The quote above would have meant he was on a tenner a week less than the average....a lot of money back then.

Then again, when I see the so-called average weekly pay now it makes me laugh wryly, as there's a Hell a lot of workers on less basic than that.

[johnnyboy-wonder57]

Rex.
The average wage is always skewed above what a lot of people earn, more so today as pay differentials between the lowest earners and the highest earners have differentiated more.

£30 gross?, x 52 would be £1560; annually, but they did have Bankers & politicians in 1971 didn't they!

Cheers

John

JBW

[statik]

Hi JBW, it's right £5 a week for the first month as a 16 year old boy in a factory, and even worked a week in hand.  Still have some wage packets.  The metal workers earned between £28 and £35.  Moved on to better things later on in that year something like £11.00 a week in another factory and got an apprenticeship. 

[Bomber]

I started work in 1974 for a stunning £15 a week... wages were rising quickly see I can see Statik will be about right. (LMAO I'm not quite as old as you decrepit old buggers  )

[Bomber]

"Did I mention I worked 27 hours a day and lived in a shoe box.  Tell that to the kids of today and they won't believe you."

Luxury!   

[statik]

The songs had words too.

Do arrh diddy diddy dum diddy do......................

Don't write them like that anymore.