Amity Shlaes has a Bloomberg View column up about inflation:
Author Daniel Yergin tells the story of a student in Freiburg who ordered a cup of coffee in a cafe; the price was 5,000 marks. Then he had another. When the bill came, it was 14,000. "If you want to save money and you want two cups of coffee, you should order them both at the same time," he was told.
And:
Another way to put this is how the central banker Henry Wallich did. Inflation is like a banana, Jerry Jordan of the Cleveland Fed quoted him as saying. Once you see one brown spot, it's too late.