What $100 Bought Then vs. Now: A Gun Show Surplus Price Time Machine

In September 1993 the Seattle Times found Chinese-made SKS and MAK-90 rifles selling for as little as $80, "priced like items in a going-out-of-business sale." Adjusted for inflation, that $80 is about $178 in 2025 money, and the average SKS at Rock Island Auction brought $697 in 2022. Meanwhile the humblest thing on the table, a .22 LR cartridge, can cost less in real terms than it did in 1947. Here is what classic show-table items cost then, what they cost now, and which ones actually beat inflation.

How the price time machine works

The plan: take items every show regular recognizes, find what they cost around 1990, and convert to today's dollars. The hard part was 1990 itself. Plenty of people remember a price from that year. Very few wrote it down anywhere a fact-checker can open. Where no well-dated 1990 figure exists, each item uses the earliest dated price that could be verified, and the table names the year.

Inflation comes from the CPI-U annual averages in the Minneapolis Fed's CPI table. The formula: old price × (2025 CPI ÷ old-year CPI). The 2025 average is 321.9. The table lists 334.4 for 2026 but marks it as an estimate, so everything here is in 2025 dollars. Old-year values used: 22.3 (1947), 109.6 (1986), 144.5 (1993), 163.0 (1998), 236.7 (2014), 237.0 (2015) and 251.1 (2018), plus 130.7 for 1990 in the multiplier tip below. Worked example, the SKS: $80 × (321.9 ÷ 144.5) = $80 × 2.228 = about $178.

None of these are gun-show receipts. They are a newspaper's street range, fixed prices from the nonprofit Civilian Marksmanship Program (CMP), auction averages, catalog list prices and dated online listings. Show-table asks orbit those anchors.

The scoreboard: then, adjusted and now

Each row pairs the oldest dated price found with the newest.

Where "today" is a 2022 auction average, comparing it with a 2025-dollar figure is the conservative test: it makes beating inflation harder, not easier. Rock Island's averages include the buyer's premium.

SKS: the going-out-of-business sale closed

The 1993 Seattle Times story by Eric Nalder put SKS and MAK-90 rifles at $80 to $300 and, citing an ATF estimate, reported China exporting roughly 80,000 of the rifles to the United States each year. The range covers both rifles, so $80 is the floor of what the paper found, not a typical sticker. Even the top adjusts to only about $668.

Rock Island Auction's SKS study averaged its sales at $449 in 2015 and $697 by 2022, leaving out prototypes, documented war trophies and presentation pieces. In 2022 the Norinco average was $679, the Yugoslav M59/66 $838 and the Russian Tula $1,131. Below auction level, Gun Digest put a generic Chinese SKS in good condition at about $400 to $450 in 2022. Auction averages and ordinary rack rifles are different populations. Both clear the adjusted $80 floor easily, but only the auction average tops the adjusted $300 ceiling, about $608 in 2022 dollars.

The why is mostly supply. Gun Digest's Adam Borisenko cites the 1994 end of Chinese imports, the 1998 cutoff of Russian supply and how few SKS rifles remain worldwide that can legally be brought into the U.S. Rock Island credits import bans plus collector interest. The history of those import bans is its own story, and the country premiums are in the SKS country-variant guide.

M1 Garand: from 230,000 in storage to "sold out"

In January 1999 the GAO reported on the new CMP corporation: as of September 1998, the corporation charged $400 to $750 per M1 Garand depending on condition, about $790 to $1,481 in 2025 dollars. The report counted more than 230,000 Garands in Army storage at Anniston awaiting potential transfer. Of the 22,584 firearms the corporation sold between October 1996 and September 1998, more than 72 percent were Garands.

On September 29, 2026, the CMP's M1 Garand page showed Rack Grade sold out as of January 7, 2025, Field Grade as of December 2, 2025, and Service Grade as of October 22, 2024. The cheapest Garand still available was the Expert Grade at $1,150 plus $35 shipping.

That $1,150 is about 46 percent above the inflation-adjusted 1998 floor of $790, and well below the adjusted ceiling of $1,481. Grades aren't identical across three decades, and the CMP sets prices rather than letting a market find them. The open market is clearer: Rock Island's Garand study found the rifle more than doubled in value from 2010 to 2021, while CPI rose about 24 percent (218.1 to 271.0).

The bigger change isn't the sticker. In 1998 the question was which grade to order. In 2026 it is whether any are left.

Mosin-Nagant: seven years was plenty

The Mosin has its own price-history feature, so here is only the inflation math. Rock Island's Mosin study averaged its sales at $211.83 in 2015 and $692.69 in 2022. The 2015 figure is about $288 in 2025 dollars, or about $262 in 2022 dollars, the fairer same-year comparison. The 2022 average ran about 2.4 times the first figure and 2.6 times the second.

No well-dated 1990 Mosin price turned up. The famous cheap Mosin lives mostly in memory; American Rifleman's Guy J. Sagi teased readers in 2022 about passing on fine rifles because the tag seemed outrageous. Rock Island lists sanctions in March 2014, expanded three years later, then "a much stricter embargo on all Russian arms and ammunition" after the Russo-Ukrainian War. It also notes that shooters and collectors are simply willing to pay more.

The 1911: a fixed price meets a crowd

In January 2018 the Army transferred 8,000 M1911 pistols to the CMP, and Army Times reported, citing a GAO report, that the CMP received 19,000 requests. The prices, per The Firearm Blog in May 2018: Rack Grade $850, Field Grade $950 and Service Grade $1,050, shipping included. In 2025 dollars, about $1,090, $1,218 and $1,346.

What those pistols bring today is the one number this project could not pin down; no dated, published market average for CMP-sold 1911s turned up. Rock Island's M1911 study found its sample (Colt, Remington-UMC, Remington Rand and Springfield Armory, very good or better, rarities excluded) rose 32.67 percent from 2015 through 2020, while CPI rose about 9 percent (237.0 to 258.8). More than two requests per pistol suggests the CMP's fixed price sat below what buyers would have paid. That is a demand signal, not an appraisal.

Ammunition: where inflation mostly won

Start with .22 LR. Writing in Shooting Industry in 2021, Massad Ayoob pulled a 1947 Stoeger Shooter's Bible off his shelf: a 50-round box of ordinary .22 LR carried an MSRP of 39 cents. That is 0.78 cents a round, about 11.3 cents in 2025 dollars. BulkAmmoFinder, a sister site of this one that tracks a retail partner's bulk catalog, logged .22 LR at a lowest observed 8.6 cents a round in its catalog dated July 24, 2026. A 1947 box list price against a 2026 bulk low flatters today, and that low is the page's only priced .22 LR record, a 6,300-round case. The direction is still hard to argue with.

The 1986 Gun Digest he also consulted listed 9mm ball at $22.50 per 50-round box: 45 cents a round, about $1.32 in 2025 dollars. BulkAmmoFinder's July 2026 catalog showed 9mm from 20 cents a round observed.

Price memory cuts both ways. The Firearm Blog's price roundup for September 26, 2014, listed its best .22 LR price at 15 cents a round, for a 1,000-round case of Winchester. That is about 20 cents in 2025 dollars, more than double the July 2026 low.

7.62x39 is the exception. The same roundup listed a 1,000-round case of Wolf FMJ at $199.90, 20 cents a round, about 27 cents adjusted. The lowest observed 7.62x39 price in BulkAmmoFinder's July 2026 catalog was 60 cents, more than double that. Wolf is a commercial brand, not military surplus, and the 2026 figure is one retail partner's catalog, not the whole market.

Two items stay off the table. BulkAmmoFinder has no 7.62x54R page, and no well-dated early surplus price for it turned up. No documented 1990 gun show admission price turned up either. An honest gap beats an invented number.

What $100 bought, then and now

The same Benjamin at four points on the timeline. For scale, $100 in 1993 is about $223 in 2025 dollars.

The pattern in these numbers: rifle money buys less than it used to, and .22 LR money buys more than it did in 2014.

Why some items outran inflation and others didn't

The supply was finite. Surplus is a well, not a factory. The GAO counted more than 230,000 Garands in storage in 1998; by 2026 the CMP's three cheapest grades were sold out. The 1911 sale opened with 8,000 pistols and 19,000 requests.

Import doors closed. Gun Digest dates the end of Chinese SKS imports to 1994 and the Russian cutoff to 1998. Rock Island describes 2014 sanctions, import restrictions on some Russian companies long tied to large Mosin imports, and a stricter embargo after the Russo-Ukrainian War. When new supply stops, the rifles already in the country become the whole market.

Collectors arrived. Rock Island's Garand study lists election cycles, perceived scarcity, interest in tangible history and familiarity from World War II media among the reasons prices climbed. Once buyers care whether an SKS came from Tula or a Chinese factory, the rifle stops being a commodity and becomes a specimen.

Ammunition like .22 LR and 9mm is the counterexample: still manufactured, and cheap at the dated catalog low. 7.62x39 looks like the one ammunition row that caught the import problem, though price data alone cannot prove the cause.

"Beat inflation" does not mean "good investment." The rifle math ignores buyer's premiums, shipping, transfer fees, storage and the chance that a given rifle is worse than the average one.

What this means at the show table

The price-memory trap works both ways. The buyer who remembers $80 SKS rifles thinks every modern tag is robbery. The seller who saw one spectacular auction result thinks every rifle is that rifle. The price tag translator decodes the second habit, and the gun show price guide explains how to build comps that fix both. Pick a date on the show calendar and bring your numbers.

1. Put a year on every price you remember. An undated memory is a story, not a comp.
2. Adjust it. A 1990 price times about 2.46, or a 1993 price times about 2.23, puts it in 2025 dollars.
3. Ask what kind of price it was: catalog list, CMP fixed price, auction result with premium, or show-table ask.
4. Name the exact variant. A Tula SKS and a Norinco SKS averaged more than $450 apart at Rock Island in 2022.
5. Find one dated current comp and write its date next to it.
6. For ammunition, compare a dated online per-round price plus shipping before calling the table price high.
7. Walk if the whole price rests on one headline auction sale.

For ammunition, a dated online number is the quickest check, and our show-versus-online comparison covers the shipping and fees that belong in it. For surplus rifles, condition, originality and variant do the pricing; a national average only starts the conversation.