I hear it all the times that Gold and Silver are a hedge against inflation but they do not always maintain purchasing power…a very simple example would be comparing mcdonalds Burgers in various years with price of silver:

1955 Hamburger 15 cents, Silver 1 USD per ounce

1967 Hamburger 18 cents, Silver 3 USD per oune

1979 Hamburgers 43 cents, Silver 30-40USD per ounce

1995 Big Mac hamburger $1.99, Silver 4.4~6 USD per ounce

2002 Double cheeseburgers $1.00, Silver 4.25~5.1 USD per ounce

2013 Mcdouble cheeseburgers 99 US cents, Silver 29.95~33.5 USD per ounce

Interesting to note that while price of Burger rose from 43 cents to 1.99$ an increase of 5 times, the silver value fell from 35(average) to 4.75 USD.

If one could buy 81 Hamburgers using an ounce of Silver in 1979 the same one ounce of silver fetched only 5 burgers in 2002.

There was no period of negative inflation between 1979 to 2002 to warrant a reduction in Silver price based on the theory that bullion is hedge for inflation.

I have used Mc for the comparison as BigMC index is a commonly used index for estimating cost of living across various countries. There could be asset classes that could throw a different result and compounded with Exchange rates the results would differ for different countries.

Would be great if you could contribute similar data in comments and lets see if the hypothesis holds good?