I bought my Gerstner 042 ca 1979-80. I believe the price was right around $200-250. It was a lot of money in those days, but I was single and working a lot overseas. I figured it was a "now or never" type of decision. I bought the chest through an industrial supply firm outside Downingtown, PA called "Hatts" if I remember the name right.
In 1973-75, I was working at Millstone Unit II nuclear powerplant on the construction site. There was a fine old time hardware/mill supply on Bank Street in New London, CT called "Gruskin's". Gruskin's always had a few Gerstner chests on the shelves in their store. I kept meaning to buy one and never did. Time and jobs rolled along, and I decided to buy the Gerstner 042 (?- the chest with the drawer for the "Machinery's Handbook") since I had been buying a lot of my tools and supplies thru Hatts. As I recall, they had to order the chest. It is not a decision I have regretted.
Peter M speaks of the year 1959 and the Automat. Sounds like NY City of possibly Philly to me. Back in those days at the Automats, you got a bunch of nickels and bought your meal using nickels as "coin of the realm". They had a change clerk in a kind of kiosk and she'd take a dollar bill and you got 20 nickels. The food was in vending equipment with marble facades and small glass doors in heavily nickelled frames. The placard on each food or beverage item said "deposit X nickels". You did that, turned the knob and opened the glass door to take out your selection. Great baked beans and great coffee, and you ate at real tables with real metal flatware on china or glass serving dishes. Cops, cabbies, and everyone else in need of a quick/reasonably priced feed frequented the Automats. A buck's worth of nickels could buy a decent amount of food, even in 1968 when I started engineering school. There was an Automat a little walk away from the engineering school. Close to the school was a beat-up bar or tavern known to all the engineering students as "Greasy's". I think the real name was "the Rose Grill". It was a beatup old bar where locals and hungry engineering students ate and also drank. They had a hot food line, and a knackwurst sandwich with sauerkraut on a hard roll was 40 cents, while a short beer was about 30 cents. If you were done with classes and had taken a pounding on an exam, you could have a boilermaker (shot of whisky, beer chaser), for 90 cents in Greasy's.
I have no idea what a new Gerstner chest cost. Probably up over a thousand bucks. My son was working in NYC one summer about 7 or 8 years ago. He said he had found a "bargain"- a bar having a special on boilermakers for only 7 bucks. In some bars in NYC, you pay more than that for a beer. Indexing things to a gallon of regular gasoline, ca 1972, was about 42 cents. Gasoline hovers around $2.65 a gallon here in NY state, and applying that index to a Gerstner chest costing 200 bucks in 1979, the Gerstner chest would now cost about 1200-1500 bucks.
The Automats are history, and modern fast food joints and the fast food they serve are nowhere near the caliber of the old Automats. Subway fare in those days when I was in engineering school was a whopping 25 cents. With a buck or two, a person could eat reasonably and travel around NY City and have a little change left over.
I worked in a union machine shop while in school, and as a helper, I think I started at $1.87 an hour. When I moved on up to journeyman a few years later, I think the starting rate was maybe 4.00 or 4.50 an hour. When I got out of school as a freshly-minted mechanical engineer, I left home to work on powerplant construction projects. My starting salary, which was considered quite good for the times, was $12,000 a year. I rented a furnished efficiency apartment for 40 bucks a week, and for about 10 bucks, got a sack of groceries which would last a few days. A bowl of chili for lunch was 60 cents, coffee was a quarter. Time and the value of a dollar seem to have spiraled into a blur at this point. I am allegedly retired, will turn 70 in September, God willing, and wonder where the years went and find myself a bit bewildered at how fast the world is now moving when I go on engineering jobs or leave the bubble that is our home environment in our hills. I do some work for a local machine shop, and it is heartening to see the Gerstner wood chests at the toolmakers' workbenches, and to see them running manual machine tools like Hardinge HLV lathes and Bridgeports and Moore jig borers. This same shop has CNC machine tools including a brand-new 5 axis Haas CNC machining center, CNC waterjet, wire EDM, and a bunch more of the modern stuff, but plenty of one-off jobs get done in the old ways on manual machine tools. The wood machinist chests seem to be one of the constants.