Cat Potts, Chapter 9, Question 6

The passage that grabbed me the most in this chapter was the perception with which many people approach prices in the market. Wheelan mentions grandmothers complaining about expensive chicken, when in reality the proportion of the dollar value of a chicken and the amount of time it takes an average American to pay for a chicken has decreased exponentially over the last century. This is so fascinating, as we as a culture are so used to griping about the prices of things and the bad economy and basically anything else we can think of that might be going "poorly". But, in retrospect, things are so much more affordable (monetary cost-wise) than they have been in the past. So, why do we spend so much  time complaining if we are actually better off than we used to be? And why is it that so many people are unaware of this change that we've seen over the past century?