Dollar Tree stores, when they were a dollar.
Yeah it was a very nice point in time when you were tight on a budget and there was dollar tree near you, everything very affordable. Not everything was built to last and most of the food were arguably unhealthy but you got by with what you could get. Nowadays, we’ve seen Dollar Tree turn into just any dollar store you could think of.
24/7 Wal-Marts
It’s been a while but there was that time Wal-Mart was opened for 24 hours. This allowed you to shop at 2 in the morning, in a big store, with next to no one. Sure some of the services might not be available but that isn’t the point. And maybe it disgruntled a lot of overnight workers who’re trying to get the store ready for the normal period of the day, now having anything disrupted and so few people to cover the store.
Video Games that were shipped in complete versions
Back when developers actually had to make sure that what they’re shipping out to be played, was both good and functioning. Now everyone lately is so quick to release games that breaks on Day 1, require lots of patches that take weeks to even years, slapping on Early Access to milk even more money from people and eventually not even test it. While still charging top dollar.
Ah 24/7 Walmart, that’s how I bought my first stuff for experimenting with femininity, waiting until 2am and going a town over to ensure nobody I knew saw me…
And to answer your question the wild west internet. There was freedom and rebellion there. A whole new world with every weirdo, freak, and nerd at your fingertips. A place where you weren’t alone until you found a person who could recommend a place, but instead you could just look it up and find out where your kind of freaks were chatting and they’d even tell you if there was a place irl. Ironically I’m noticing a shift back to needing to know a person to find a place, but that place is a discord server more often these days.
Knees that didn’t crack.
A Dollar Tree opened near me in Canada within the last year. Now don’t get me wrong, our local Dollarama isn’t amazing or anything, but that Dollar Tree is embarrassingly bad by comparison. 75% of a shelves were just straight up empty, and what was actually on the shelves was so cheaply made that I’d be embarrassed to give it away, let alone charge what they were trying to charge for it.
There was one aisle pretty well stocked though. They had an entire aisle dedicated exclusively to bibles. What the actual fuck?
The climate.
Zebra Stripe gum
The candle that burns brightly fades quickly
Nintendo after the GameCube dropped. Getting demolished by Sony letting basically any third party go nuts with what seemed like zero curation made them follow suit. Granted, they were a bit obnoxious about it… but the shift in quality even for their own IPs was huge.
The pre-algorithm internet and social media era of about 2000-2014.
I remember when Instagram was just pictures of my friends cats, hikes, and thrift finds. It was great and fun.
When Facebook status windows automatically had an “is” following your name. So posts would start with “Mary is” and you’d fill in what you’re doing or how you’re feeling.
When Twitter used SMS and you could use it just to follow your favorite band, so whenever they posted it felt like you got a text from them. That was pretty cool.
The internet.
I am old enough to have used the internet on a DOS machine with an acoustic coupler dialing up to a hyperboard. Guess my age?
57?
- My step dad was a computer junkie and we had a machine when I was a kid.
Abort, Retry, Fail?
More like B:> Run
I’m 46 and we got a 14.4 modem in around 1992-3 I think. We used gopher and ftp then later hotline to trade shareware, then warez and serialz.
I miss those days, but I don’t miss downloading 8 of 9 parts of a file and not being able to reconnect to the server for the last one.
And then at some point you started running out of space, so you had to go back and find all those incomplete downloads, and delete them to create more space.
Wasn’t even that good for me tbh just a time wasting exercise. Release the cable eating sharks!!
Censorship being taboo.
90s and early 2000s gaming
The glory days when every tech generation felt like a rocket-powered slingshot into the future.
Yeah, I miss it too
The glory days when every tech generation felt like a rocket-powered slingshot into the future.
“Graphics can’t possibly get any better than this!” —Me about the N64
US Democracy
I wouldn’t call its previous state “good”
🌎🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
Pensions
I barely got grandfathered into a pension program with the US military. They went away in 2015. I had served over a decade at that point and they still let me retire in 2022 under that program. The new program is a sort of 401k type system, but I didn’t have enough years in service to contribute to it for retirement, so they didn’t even give me the option to switch over.
Granted, I retired after only 20 years served so my pension is not very big. But it’s money in my pocket every month for the rest of my life, so I’m not complaining. I’ll never starve or go without shelter.
which kind? corporate ones, or public ones?
Depends where you live.
When one still could have the reasonable impression that everyone is the same before the law.
When was that?
Childhood.
We believed a lot of wonderful things in the 90s.
I know this is a rhetorical question. Still.
Maybe childhood as turtle answered, but also before this whole US downturn with openly proven criminals and still nothing happened.
From outside of the US it started for me with the impeachment of Trump.
He’s not the first of course. But before that at least an effort was put into the appearance.
TIL that Walmart aren’t open 24hrs anymore. I thought it switched back after COVID, but I guess not.
I haven’t tried visiting a Walmart after 7pm in a very long time.
I think the covid thing happening was their excuse to seize doing that. They were 24/7 right around that period. But I could also see other reasons why they stopped. I mean, overnights were poorly staffed and it’s wal-mart, everyone is going to be getting away with tons of shit like stealing and customers getting rowdy.
Personally, as an overnight worker, I’m glad it ended. I miss being able to shop peacefully but, better safe than convenient.
It probably got expensive to keep all those overnight workers to handle the few customers they had. And those that are still left, and stocking the shelves for the next day, will be replaced by robotic stockers before too long.
*Cease
Just FYI
24 hour Home Depots were amazing.
Restaurants and stores that weren’t chains
plenty of those around if you live in a city. i grew up in a rural/suburban area and even in the 90s there was nothing but chain restaurants apart from some crappy pub or pizza place in the town center.
