Good Times: Why $4.25 an Hour Was Life-Changing Money (And Why the Show Still Hits)
There’s a scene in Good Times — one of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments that actually says everything — where James Evans Jr. lands a job paying $4.25 an hour. The family erupts. Florida’s eyes light up. James Sr. looks like a man who just got a pardon. The kids are hollering like it’s Christmas morning in July. Watch it yourself:
If you’re watching that clip today, your first instinct might be to laugh. Four dollars and twenty-five cents an hour? That’s not a raise — that’s a rounding error on your coffee. But hold on, because that reaction tells you more about us than it does about them. That scene is a window straight into the gut of 1970s working-class Black America, and once you understand what you’re actually looking at, the Good Times TV show hits completely different.
$4.25 an Hour and What It Actually Meant
In 1974, the federal minimum wage was $2.00 an hour. By 1979 — the show’s final year — it had climbed to $2.90. So $4.25 an hour wasn’t just a job. For a family living in the Cabrini-Green housing projects on Chicago’s north side, that was legitimately good money. That was the difference between eating every night and not. Between keeping the lights on and sitting in the dark. Between dignity and the constant low-grade panic that defines real poverty.
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The Evans family didn’t celebrate because they were easily impressed. They celebrated because they knew exactly how rare that moment was — and how fast it could disappear. That’s the emotional core the Good Times TV show was built on, and it’s what made it unlike almost anything else on American television at the time.
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The Retro Almanac
A monthly roundup of "on this day" highlights from that month, decades back — plus first dibs on new retro merch drops. No spam, just the good stuff.
