A candy bar used to cost a dime. A movie ticket cost less than two dollars. A brand-new car could be driven off the lot for around $3,500. Those numbers are real. Nobody voted to change them, and no single person raised them — yet prices climbed anyway, across every store in the country, decade after decade. Written for readers ages 9 to 12, this book starts with a puzzle a kid can feel — why an allowance doesn't stretch as far as it used to — and builds from there into a clear picture of how money actually works. It covers what money is and why a piece of paper is worth anything, the three different forces that push prices upward, how inflation gets measured by people walking into stores with clipboards, and who gains and loses when prices rise. The book takes its reader seriously. Where economists genuinely disagree — including about the price increases of recent years — it says so instead of picking a side. It ends with something more useful than a set of facts: the ability to hear a claim about prices on the news and know which questions to ask.