Where I work, we can’t give people cash refunds if they’ve paid with their credit card, so we use the Zip-Zap machine. I love using it! I feel like I sould also be recording their purchases in a a huge ledger with copperplate handwriting. We also use it if our eftpos goes down.
We had a dial phone (what are they properly called? Rotary?) when I was a (very little) kid, and mum gave it to us to play with when we got a touch-tone phone. Actually, who refers to them as ‘touch-tone’ anymore? I remember seing infomercials on the tv that required a touch-tone phone to call, but it’s been about ten years since I heard the term.
I used to pay $5 for fifteen minutes on the internet at the only net-cafe in town. Now they’re all over the place and I pay a dollar an hour.
Did everything have pricetags, and the cashiers just knew the codes for the fruid and veges?
Were supermarkets smaller? Was there less stuff?
Did the whole thing just take a long time?
Everything had a price tag on it, except for produce and deli meat that was weighed and then priced. Most checkers at the grocery store knew the stock backwards and forwards–but back then, there weren’t 50 different types of yogurt to choose from etc. (heck, yogurt debuted on the shelves here circa 1975).
I remember watching a stock boy (another lost relic) use a new thingy to automatically stick the individual price tags on each can of soup! It was amazing, I tells ya.
Nonprogrammable coffee makers.
clip art for school papers–you had to cut out the desired object (autumn leaves, kids playing, whatever), affix it to the paper you wanted it to show up on, and then make copies. Now it’s all computer generated.
garage doors that did not open by hitting a switch.
Bwahahahahahahah, we only had three real channels and channel 11 which was fuzzy and only had public service stuff you didn’t want to watch. AND WE WERE HAPPY!! Damn these extravagent times, 12 channels, what a waste!!! What’s the world coming to? Hell in a handbasket I says.
Perculators! And make sure you add just a bit of salt to counter the bitterness…
Remember Lettraset, those sheets with letters on them, each sheet had one “font” with, maybe, different sizes and you held the letter in position and rubbed over with a pencil?
Everything did have price tags. The stock clerks had these big pricing guns and marked the products extremely quickly. However, a price change meant that everything on the shelf had to come off and be retagged. You would often see products with a lot of price tags stacked on top or close to one another if the product had been there for a while. It was also hard to keep the price tags consistent on the same product. Finding say, a can of soup, with a lower price than the others meant that is what you would probably pay although some cashiers did memorize a good portion of the correct prices in the store. Manual price checks resulting from missing price tags were very common.
Cashiers had to enter numbers very quickly and accurately. Produce and other qeighable items were put on the scale just like now except the cashier had to X-Ref a lookup chart to calculate the total cost.
There are way more products now than there were then.
In the store I worked in in 1977, there was stuff that sold rapidly, and I just knew the prices on those (and the store owner would tell me if he upped the price), and then there were items that didn’t move as fast, which were far more likely to have a price stamped on them. Then there was a spiral notebook I could consult if necessary.
The cash register itself… it had electricity, let’s get that out of the way
The main buttons on the cash register looked like this:
$90 $9 90¢ 9¢
$80 $8 80¢ 8¢
$70 $7 70¢ 7¢
$60 $6 60¢ 6¢
(etc)
Then there were a handful of category buttons — "Sundries", "Staples", "Dry Goods", "Tax" "Amt Tendered", "Total", and stuff like that. So to sell someone a bottle of Maalox for $1.39, let's say, you'd push down the $1 button, the 30¢ button, and the 9¢ button and then hit (let's say) "Sundries", which causes the price-entry to be accepted and to print a line on the paper tape that says "$1.38 Sundries". The numbers and category would pop up in the glass window on the cash register, too, for the customer to see (and for you to see, too, the little rectangles were printed on both sides)
You would be expected to know the applicable tax. New Mexico had a 4% sales tax at that time, so (IIRC) the tax on $1.39 would be 5¢, so you'd hit the 5¢ button and the "Tax" button and another line would be printed on the tape (and come up in the glass window). You hit the "Total" button and the cash register would do the math for you and print/display "$1.44 TOTAL".
Customer hands you two ones. You hit the $2 button followed by the "Amt Tendered" button and the cash register does the math for you again and reports and prints out "$0.56 CHANGE" and the cash drawer pops open. You slide the two ones into the ones drawer, and pull out a penny, a nickel, and two quarters and then count the change back to the customer as you put it in the customer's hand: "One forty four, (penny) forty five, (nickel) fifty, (quarter) seventy-five, (quarter) two, thank you and have a nice day".
Yes son, it used to be that every month, the bank would return your checks after they were cashed, and you would balance the check book. Everytime you would write a check, you would subtract the amount from your bank balance. When the statement came, you would add up all the checks that didn’t come back (by hand :eek: )and see if your balance was the same as the bank statement. Without calculators and with most purchases done by check, it would take a long time.
Oh, what’s a check?
My mother didn’t like scanners when the first were used. Apparently, part of grochery shopping involved watching the checker to make sure that the price was rung up correctly. Mom was concerned that with the new system stores could change prices without the shoppers’ knowledge.
I was amazed a while back when my mom informed me that, before they had printers and stuff, her office had a guy they hired who’s sole job was drawing graphs and charts.
…or that when they finally did get a computer and printer she had to go out of her building and walk a couple blocks to another office to use them.
…or that she was considered strange for knowing how to touchtype her own documents instead of relying on an office secretary that would take a week to get through the queue to her sheet.
She felt just a wee bit older after that conversation.
A neighbor worked at the local A&P and I can remember watching her ring up groceries on Fridays when my mother went shopping. We’re talking big grocery carts full - and she was fast! Did it all by touch, too.
Of course there are the few exceptions here and there. The owners of the these rare devices can be identified by their drastically larger bicept on their left arm.
I don’t know if you had them in the USA, but I had to tell one of my daughters about dynamo-driven lights on the bike. She thought they sounded super cool. Man do I remember feeling like a mule driving those beasts.
My concern is WHAT they can see with a little 'ol Google search. I don’t WANT them to think sex includes a minature pony and a midget in lederhosen(*)
(* for the love of pete, I couldn’t remember lederhosen…so I went to the google bar at the top of the browser and typed ‘german ethnic clothing’…I’da been screwed in the 70’s if I couldn’t remember a word.)
