a US Quarter in 1980 is worth 0.90USD now, you'd plug 4-5 into a machine a day, it's not actually that much worse
except that while USD has almost quadrupled in that time, minimum wage has only gone up by just over double
though median doesn't, but median is complicated
i just think it's interesting that while lootboxes exploit ADHD etc, people aren't equally up in arms about how we did basically the same thing to people with arcade machines, even if some of it was paying for labor. especially because it needed to turn a profit. is this just a people not realizing things have gone up, thing, or?