It is always nostalgic to look back like this at a different time, like the fact that there were a lot more hobby stores back in the day for example. The prices are interesting, but as always it is easy to look back and say "that was cheap", without realizing what salaries and such were back then. One of the things to keep in mind is that the CPI is a fairly good rule of thumb to figure out real prices but it is only that. For example, for people wanting to send their kids to college, the cost of college since the 1960's has gone up well above the rate of inflation.
Then, too, it is comparing technology. That ZW from 1960 was a really solid unit, and then you look at a modern ZW-L costing close to 30 times what it did back then when inflation is 10x...but the modern ZW-L also has things that old ZW-L didn't have (among other things, a ZW-L was effectively around 190W output..the ZW-L is 600W). A typical car back then cost like let's say 1500 bucks, these days it is at least 35k (and that may be low!), but on a cost basic modern cars are a bargain. They last so much longer, they cost a lot less to maintain over the life of the car, and even the cheapest cars have features that they couldn't dream of back then, and on a per mileage basis in terms of fuel are a lot cheaper, even with today's gas prices, if you put it in equal dollars (a typical car back then got like 8mpg, today typical cars are well over 20mpg).
When people say trains were always expensive they were. Looking back as adults at the prices, we could say "Wow, I could buy a lot of trains for that kind of money"..whereas someone back then would look at a 29.95 transformer and say "my goodness, that is the food bill for a week" (well, okay, I can't comment directly on what that would be in 1960, but you get the idea).
