Deramen wrote:Game Theory made a video on that.
Game Theory's video uses gold as a standard, which I really don't like. Luxury products like gold would have been massively devaluated in any survival society.
So I've gone ahead and done some research myself on the Fallout wiki. Specifically, I did research on Fallout 3, since that had the most accessible information.
The cheap end of food consumables seem to be 3~5 bottle caps per item. I'm going to assume that each item equals one day's worth of food, which comes down to 5 bottle caps a day to keep a person alive. Since the cost of keeping one person alive in the poorest regions of the world is about 1 Int'l$ per day, that gets me roughly 20 Int'l cents on the bottle cap.
A decent processed meal seems to cost 20~50 bottle caps per item. Again assuming each item is one day's food for one person, that means roughly... $2~$4 per bottle cap. Perhaps this is explainable by the fact that processed meals aren't vitally necessary for life, and so trades at a lower value.
Next up is clothing. The non-armor clothing items seem to bottom out at around 5~6 bottle caps. The conversion rate above (20 cents per bottle cap) gives me $1.2 Int'll dollars per item of clothing. The very cheapest I can get a full set of outfit for in my home country is roughly $5~$6, and I'm from a developed country, so this sounds a bit on the low side, but not terribly so. In terms of clothing I think we're looking at 35~50 Int'l cents on the bottle cap.
Then - ammunition! A small carton of .308 ammunition costs 3 bottle caps in Fallout 3. Cabelas tells me that equivalent ammunition today trades for $7.99, which means... $2.70 per bottle cap.
Liquor trades around 10~20 bottle caps per bottle. This being a post-apocalyptic world and all, this is probably the "generic" liquor that is cheaply available, not the top-chateaux stuff that aristocrats drink. Wine apparently goes at roughly $6 on the bottle at the cheap end, and beer at roughly $1.5 on the bottle, so this is about 15 cents to 30 cents on the bottle.
Light armour (as in suit, not as in tank) seems to bottom out at 180 bottle caps. A kevlar vest is worth roughly $150, but that only covers the torso, so if we assume that light armour is worth roughly $300~$400, we're looking at $2 on the bottle cap.
There is a pattern here, it looks like. The purchasing power seems to be one bottle cap on 20~40 cents if you're buying survival goods and basic comforts, and one bottle cap on $2~$3 if you're buying heavy-industrial or luxury goods.
So yay! 3.25 krona for 13 bottle caps (noted in my IC post) actually makes canon sense!
Yeah, Run Gunners compound.