🍕 The Pizza Party Inflation Story

How money slowly buys less and less — explained with pizza

The Setup

Imagine you have a $20 bill. Your job is to feed your friends pizza. Same $20 bill. Same pizza. Same friends. Different years.

Watch what happens to how many slices that $20 can buy over time:

Pizza slice prices based on average US slice price: $1.00 (2000), $1.45 (2010), $1.85 (2020), $2.50 (2026).

Your $20 didn’t change. But the pizza did. The pizza shop didn’t make the pizza smaller. They charged more dollars for the same slice. That’s inflation — when each dollar buys less stuff than it used to.

Why Does This Happen?

Think about your class. If there are 10 cookies and 10 kids, each kid gets 1 cookie. Simple.

Now imagine someone bakes 10 MORE cookies (now 20) but doesn’t tell anyone. The kids still think 1 cookie costs 1 cookie’s worth. But really, cookies are now twice as common. So one cookie should be worth half as much.

That’s what happens with money. When governments and banks make more money (without making more pizza or cookies or houses or cars), each dollar that already existed becomes less special. It buys less.

So What Should You Do?

If pieces of paper money slowly buy less stuff over time, what makes sense?

Don’t keep all your savings as paper money sitting still.

Smart savers put their money into things that grow — things that go up in value faster than dollars go down. Like buying a small piece of a company (stocks), owning real estate, owning gold, or owning Bitcoin (a special kind of digital money where no one can make more of it).

🎯 Three Things to Remember

From the Halving House — Explain It Like I’m 5 series at Modern Wealth Model.