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.
The first gaming system that connected to the Internet was the Sega Dreamcast, and even that ran games only off disc. It isn’t until you get to the PS3/XBox 360 era when games would be downloaded to the console directly, and even then games weren’t expected to need an Internet connection to use.
Mario Brothers might have had a small design team, but Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had a much larger dev team.
SA had 50-60 devs. in 2025 that’s a small dev team. The original gta3 had 25-30. SA only has about double the devs of GTA3
GTA6 dev team is over 6,000 people. Most dev teams today are to 400-500 people for AAA games.