Outdated 70s/80s things you miss.

[Earth 2 Chris]

Common sense
Courtesy
Manners

Oh, and the little holiday toys that had a spring and suction cup, and when you pressed down on them, they eventually popped up. I loved those things.

[palitoy]

Video Stores are a big one for me.

[ODBJBG]

Video Stores are a big one for me.

There was still a decent video market in the US prior to Covid. Family Video was doing really good business, mostly because they owned all their land, but it was great to see them survive and thrive in an era when almost every other video store had folded. Unfortunately Covid accelerated the move away from physical discs and killed their business. They still own the land and run other stuff out of them all across the US, but its frustrating that we had a semblance of that old feeling still left and the pandemic hastened its demise.

I still think a video store has potential, and I suppose there are some scattered about but it'll never be what it once was. I was thinking recently about how much fun it was on a weekend to go to the video store, browse for an hour, chat with some like mined people and rent a few movies, get some snacks, maybe a game. You were set for the weekend. That sort of experience is just lost on future generations.

[Jorge Galvan]

This probably makes me look dumb but i used to wonder why Kresges stores used Kmart bags lol

Don't feel bad. This is the first time I "heard" of KREGES.

[Jorge Galvan]

I truly miss spending a few hours at bookstores. Yeah you can stream books now but just going to a store and looking at that cover artwork and then reading the back cover to see what the story was my favorite "me time".

You don't have book stores near you? Not even a HALF-PRICE BOOKS?

I go to B&N every other week after work just to see what is out there and it is a great way to decompress from work.

I have to just to see the books, magazines, dvds! I usually avoid the cds as most of them are compilations/greatest hits.

[Jorge Galvan]

I'm with you on most everything in your post, but I have to disagree about cassettes. Not saying I don't still play an occasional cassette, but often when I play a cassette it'll have a weird muffled effect, or maybe the bulk of the sound will come from only one speaker, or if the tape's starting to go bad, it'll screeeech. Personal preference I know, but I sure like CDs *a lot* more than I ever liked cassettes.

To me, CDs are as easy to transport and store as cassettes were/are, and for my own use, I find them more convenient. I like the way you can just hit 'skip' if you don't like a song on a CD, whereas with a tape you had to go thru the ritual of fast forwarding/rewinding (unless you had a 'high tech' tape player where you could hit ffwd. and it'd stop at the end of the song you were trying to ffwd. over.)

That said, in line with your comment about "wood grain on everything", to this day I still *like* paneling-I've never had a thing against it.

Apes! I still have videos and cassettes that still play well and don't have ANY deterioration, I know it has been stated that these tapes go bad after 25 years, but who know?

I would use brands SONY, MAXELL, TDK for both VHS & CASSETTES; I avoided the "generic" brands as I knew these were the top tier products


T-120's or T-160's for VHS


90mins for cassettes.

[Jorge Galvan]

Video Stores are a big one for me.

SAVE THE DATE!!

https://isitaholidaytoday.com/holiday/international-independent-video-store-day

[Jorge Galvan]

Common sense
Courtesy
Manners

Oh, and the little holiday toys that had a spring and suction cup, and when you pressed down on them, they eventually popped up. I loved those things.

AMEN!

in this day and age! Nonexistent

[Jorge Galvan]

Here's one!


RADIOSHACK!

[apes3978]

Apes! I still have videos and cassettes that still play well and don't have ANY deterioration, I know it has been stated that these tapes go bad after 25 years, but who know?

I would use brands SONY, MAXELL, TDK for both VHS & CASSETTES; I avoided the "generic" brands as I knew these were the top tier products


T-120's or T-160's for VHS


90mins for cassettes.

I have factory made VHS (as well as home recording VHS) tapes that play great, or as great as can be expected, but for whatever reason a lot of my factory made <music> tapes have some of the issues I mentioned in my earlier post. I'm sure my cassette player could use a cleaning, but even with that I think some of the tapes would just be funky sounding.

You were right to avoid the lower grade tapes-I remember buying some of the cheaper brands and recording on them and even at the time they were 'new', they didn't sound as good as let's say Memorex or TDK.

[apes3978]

Don't feel bad. This is the first time I "heard" of KRESGES.

We had a Kresge's here in town, and two K-Marts (one on the East side of town, one on the West side of town). We went to all of them.

You mentioned never hearing of Kresge's before, I can relate: I remember us buying a box of match book matches at K-Mart and on the match books it had the names of their stores, K-Mart, Kresge's, and Jupiter! We never had a Jupiter store in town, so I always wondered what that store may have been like.

[MRP]

-Spinner racks of comics in every drug store and convenience store
-flipping through encyclopedias to learn new and interesting things
-scouring TV Guide to find interesting things to watch/set the VCR for on the various channels
-prizes in cereal boxes
-Scholastic Book Fairs (I'm sure they still have them in some capacity but my participation in them is long past dated)
-Rambling Root Beer
-MTV as a source of new music/music videos

-M