What’s better than $5 for a beer and a shot? Just $1 for The Real Deal’s annual Data Book and a month of unlimited access to subscriber-exclusive content.
Sign up for a digital subscription by Sunday, Jan. 23 for this unmissable deal — before you do that, though, let’s do some price indexing and see what else your dollar bill could buy you.
1. Half a slice of pizza
Inflation was a cruel mistress. Among her casualties was the dollar slice. In a city where policy change is glacial on a good day, dollar pizza was a near-flawless concept immaculately executed.
Dollar pizza has seen me through a lot. Nights that began with a beer and a shot always ended with a plain slice and a can of ginger ale.
Dollar pizza fit right into the 15-minute breaks of retail work that were really 11 minutes at best. In the throes of existential dread (i.e., 2,384 unread emails), dollar pizza was there for me, and I know it’s been there for you, too.
But could it give you exclusive intel on the performance of Manhattan’s office market in 2021?
The cheesy goodness of the now-$2 slice is undeniable, but the fact remains that it can’t satiate the hunger for commercial leasing data. Deliciously color-coded and artisanally curated charts like the one below will feed you for a lifetime in the form of market insights.
What can I say? Sometimes pizza at the office just isn’t enough.
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2. Two-thirds of a Costco hot dog combo
If you were a sociable, well-adjusted suburban teenager (or the parent of one) circa 2009, you remember Saturday afternoon hangouts at the mall. If you were me, you remember Costco.
The Costco hot dog is to suburbia what the fresh croissant is to Paris: an iconic, affordable way to indulge in local culture. It first hit the menu in 1985 in the form of a $1.50 hot dog-and-soda deal.
Time passed. The Soviet Union collapsed, the stock market crashed, Amazon emerged. Through it all, the price of the hot dog has never wavered.
Inflation had her way, but it’s thanks to a vague death threat from Costco’s co-founder to its CEO that the hot dog will be $1.50 forevermore.
Like dollar pizza, the $1.50 hot dog is painfully close to perfect. Its fatal flaw, however, is the fact that it can’t give you a comprehensive breakdown of the past year’s top industrial leases in South Florida.
With all due respect to Costco, a hot dog and a soda can’t compare to a data book and a digital subscription. Put those two extra quarters towards your next load of laundry. Speaking of which…
3. A single load of laundry
In New York City, laundry falls into the death-and-taxes category of forces against which we are, ultimately, powerless. Put it off all you want. Eventually you will run out of heartbeats (and clean underwear).
It’s not hard to find cooler ways to spend a dollar — ways that don’t require you to schlep to the nearest laundromat with a surprisingly heavy sack of clothes over your shoulder. Dollar pizza, for example, usually does not involve a 45-minute wait, and then some more while you stand by for a dryer to open up.
If you’re one of the lucky New Yorkers with a washer and dryer in your kitchen, good for you, that must be nice. I have to ask, though, can your little “smart appliances” tell you who the most active architects and designers were in 2021?
Didn’t think so.
Now that you’ve learned the value of a pandemic-era dollar, do the smart thing and subscribe by Sunday.