Well, I am not talking about 20 years ago. I am talking about a matter of 3-4 years ago.
Back in 1992, I bought the SuperZero for $90 each. You can still get these on sale for $60-80 each.
But the Classic Four really went up.
Since the Federal Reserve's Quantitative Easing program started in 2009, the money supply has gone up from 800 billion to over 6 trillion, with over a trillion dollars being printed each year. The consequence if this policy is Silicon Valley is no longer the weathiest part of the country, but all counties surrounding Washington are now the wealthiest in the nation. This happens when selective insiders get all this money being printed at 0% interest, and then charge the end user 20% when it's loaned out on credit.
But the primary cause of increasing prices is money printing by the Federal Reserve. It serves the government well to inflate its debt, and to enrich Washington insiders. The rest of us pay higher prices. As far as who to blame, it comes down Richard Nixon for taking us off the gold standard, although certainly everyone after him can share in the blame for not adhering to the constitution which banned paper currency (before 1971 all of our currency used to say "silver certificate" or "payable in lawful money" (gold) so technically it was not a paper currency but just receipts for gold and silver).
Anyway, the government is not dumb. They know the people don't like this. Why else did the Department of Homeland Security buy a billion hollow-point bullets recently? According to the Defense Department, the entire U.S. military only blows throw about 17 million bullets a month. Department of Homeland Security is getting ready for a hot war with the American people that they obviously believe could last a decade.