Around a year ago, back in Animal Crossing New Leaf, I wondered if there was any way I could find a conversion rate from Animal Crossing bells to a real life currency, in this case US dollars. In order to do this, I needed to find an item you can buy in New Leaf that also exists in real life. The problem with this is most items are pretty generic in Animal Crossing and don't have definitive real life counterpart.
However, there are a few items that do definitively exist both in real life and in Animal Crossing New Leaf. Nintendo put some of their products such as the Wii U, 3DS, Wii Balance Board, etc in the game as furniture. The main problem is you cannot buy these items, as they are only obtainable via fortune cookies. So, I had to get a bit creative.
While you can't buy items like the Wii U, you can sell them. I decided to look up how much money GameStop would buy for a Wii U, and divide that amount with the in game amount. The main problem with this is the Wii U, or any console, doesn't have a definite sell price. Some other stores might take in a Wii U for more or less money. However, this was the best I could do. I believe my original conversion rate was somewhere around 117 bells = $1, and I was pretty satisfied with that... until recently.
In Animal Crossing New Horizons, you are mailed a Nintendo Switch free from Nintendo as a thank you for updating your game. I didn't think you could buy more Switches later on... but it turns out you can! Switches can be ordered freely from the catalogue once unlocked, and the price for each Switch is 29,980 bells. The price of a Switch is $300, which is far more definite then the solution I came up with in New Leaf.
So, how many bells are each dollar worth? Well, actually, every dollar is worth 99.93 bells. Since you can't have a decimal number of bells, this can be rounded up to a nice 100 bells per one US dollar. So, what can we do with this?
I decided to look at some of the things sold in the Animal Crossing games to see how much they'd cost in dollars. The thing that surprised me the most is, if you have cherries as your town's native fruit in ACNH, you can buy a single cherry for an extremely overpriced $4 (although, it's actually $2 per cherry, because cherries in Animal Crossing come in bunches of 2). I did some research online to try and find the average price of a single cherry in the real world. It's a bit difficult to tell how much cherries sell for from looking online, as different stores or companies could sell them for different amounts, but I generally got a price of around $7 per pound. One pound of cherries apparently contains around 80 cherries, meaning each individual cherry is approximately worth eight cents. This means in the Animal Crossing world, cherries are 2,500% more expensive than in our world.
This also means the almighty froggy chair is only $14.40 in our world. It truly is a small price to pay for froggy chair. If you wanted to buy Animal Crossing New Horizons within Animal Crossing New Horizons, it would cost 6,000 bells. In Animal Crossing New Leaf, you can buy a compact car from Rex's RV for 3 MEOW coupons. Each MEOW coupon can be exchanged for 3,000 bells in game, meaning the compact car is essentially worth 9,000 bells, or $90. In the Animal Crossing world, apparently cars are really cheap but cherries are extremely expensive.
TL:DR 100 bells = $1, and that's weird