I did this as well, but I think that New Jersey and one other state forbid one pumping one’s own gas.
When I left the radio biz full time in the 1990s, for many years I kept my foot in the door by doing weekend and parttime vacation relief on-the-air gigs, just for fun. COVID ended my last gig of 16 years. Nowadays, radio stations don’t have parttime air personalities. They reply on automation and voice tracking and barely have fulltime announcers outside of morning drive! Now that I’m retired, I’d love to go back on the air as a fill-in guy, but the jobs no longer exist.
Oregon did until last year. It’s also still forbidden in the town of Huntington, New York.
Our local Hannaford still has baggers. If you bring your own bag, they use those.
It makes checkout faster and more efficient.
Every grocery store in town has baggers or the cashier also bags. I’ll help sometimes. This excludes self checkout of course but most stores don’t have that.
My local stores with the two big grocery chains here in Chicago (Jewel and Mariano’s) seem to be 50/50 on this, on the lanes with actual cashiers: sometimes there’s a dedicated bagger stationed at the lane, and sometimes the cashier does the bagging. I suspect it depends on time of day and staffing levels.
I’m sitting in one as I reply, waiting for them to finish detailing my car. They’re still around.
That one other state was Oregon, but they finally changed their law last year.
I used to have a job reading newspaper articles on certain topics (such as crime) and sending them off to interested parties, like the National Watermelon Association (not specifically for crime, in that instance).
I had a couple paper routes as a kid. Back then more people subscribed to the daily paper than not so a kid’s route was dense enough to be cover by bike. Now I see people delivering by car to the very few homes that still want the paper.
I used to paint backdrops for theater. Lay out the muslin on the floor, staple it all around the edges, apply the starch wash to stretch and seize the fabric, set out a grid on the fabric, then paint from the designer’s drawing. Now they get computer printed.
There still some theatrical painting, props and set pieces, but there is so much more projectors and printed stuff now.
I can think of two jobs I had that are obsolete now, both in the 1960’s.
First was a “Board Boy” job at a brokerage. Mainly an office gopher, but an important part of the job was to maintain the projected NY Stock Exchange ticker. I had to keep an eye on the ticker as the trades streamed across, pick out the most important ones, and, using chalk on a special chalkboard, keep a running tally of the prices that day, with the latest one shown at the end.
We has about 200 stocks of interest to the board crowd, mostly retired old men who came in just as the market opened each morning to schmooze and watch their investments’ progress in real-time. When the ticker was moving fast at the market opening, I couldn’t keep up, so the board observers would shout out the latest price for important stocks as I updated the board. I was constantly scrambling from one side of the chalkboard to the other, up and down.
Overnight, I would come in to the office and wipe the chalkboard clean with furniture polish (not water) to prepare it for the next day.
My second job in this obsolete category was at a small bank in St. Louis. Originally I was hired as a figure clerk to hand-sort checks, add up the amounts and make sure they were correct before passing them along to the next department.
I noticed we had two IBM Proof Machines, and I convinced my boss that I could learn to operate those. A Proof Machine was the only IBM machine that did NOT require punch cards. They were used for many sorting operations where the sorting needed to be accompanied by dollar amounts. I heard that large banks had rooms full of these, each with a single operator sitting behind a very large desk-like console.
About this time, automated systems were being developed to read and process checks electronically, which would eliminate many manual jobs. I was offered a position to oversee this transition by the bank’s auditor, and the bank even offered to pay my way through college as long as I enrolled in a business or economic program.
I declined, as I already had a game plan to pursue engineering, not banking. I often wonder what would have happened if I had accepted the auditor’s offer, as I was in an ideal, ground-floor position to take advantage of the opportunity.
My first job is nearly gone, a COBOL programmer. Along with this I was also an RPG programmer for pretty much my entire career; disappearing quick. Part of my first job was loading the large reel style storage tapes into a Tandem & AS/400 computers to do data transfers from Ascii to EBCDIC and vice-versa. Also wrote all the conversion code for said transfers.
But computer programming and analysis is going nowhere, so languages and specific functions are just fading away.
May I explain to you about New Jersey? Self-Service is not a thing in NJ. I believe parts of Oregon also.
Do they still let kids do that ? - I’m guessing so, since my state still issues newspaper carrier permits to (working papers) to 11-18 year olds. Whether kids actually still do it is another story - and even adults haven’t collected in person around here for close to 20 years
My non-existent job- I was a proof and transit operator at a bank, which means I processed checks. People deposited checks with the teller , and at the end of the day, the branches sent all the checks to where I worked via courier. We microfilmed them and then encoded the amount in magnetic ink. They were then sorted by either the routing number ( for large banks ) or the Federal Reserve district of the bank the check was drawn on. Information about the sorting was saved on large reel to reel tapes. Then the checks were transported by courier to our Federal Reserve bank. A few years after I left this job, the job itself disappeared although some of the functions remained There had been four-five of us working any given night to process the checks from 10-15 branches. At some point, it became feasible for each teller to encode their own checks - once that happened, each branch could send them directly to the Fed. Now, I’m guessing there isn’t any encoding at all, since the few physical checks are processed through electronic images and I’m pretty sure if I hand a teller a paper check, they will scan it and it will be handled the same as if I had deposited it by scan using the bank’s app.
ETA - I can’t believe someone mentioned a similar job!
Both of these stories make me a little sad.
It’s too bad the presentation company didn’t see PowerPoint coming and adapt or move into another line of work instead of going out of business.
Similarly, it’s too bad the import company didn’t cross-train the hand-calculator guy to do other tasks that surely needed doing. Maybe they thought he was too hide-bound.
Apartment buildings still have paper deliverers. We get ours delivered every morning.
Oregon modified the law to allow people in rural areas to pump their own gas, especially after business hours.
I forgot about that. As a kid I had a paper route, too. The subscriber density must have been pretty high because I didn’t even use a bike, I pulled the load of newspapers on my trusty wagon. I don’t remember how big my route was geographically, but obviously it wasn’t very big because I never even thought of using my bike instead. And the wagon had a pretty hefty load of papers.
I just checked one of the major local newspapers and apparently home delivery is still a thing, with various options for 7-day delivery, weekends only, or Saturday only. But how they get delivered is a mystery. I never see paperboys any more, and subscribers must be few and far between.
There are probably still a few people making a living repairing typewriters. There are certainly still some people using them; and you can still buy new ones. – these people are selling both new and reconditioned typewriters, so they presumably are paying somebody to do the reconditioning.
However I’ll grant that as a common job it’s obsolete. There are undoubtedly still people making buggy whips, too. I certainly see plenty of buggies.
And I think some stations elsewhere keep a full-service pump as well as the self-serve pumps – probably useful for people who would have physical difficulty getting in and out of the car and pumping their own gas, and maybe still used by some who think filling their own car will make their dress clothes smell of gas.
Yeah, when a store’s busy enough I sometimes see somebody other than the cashiers doing the bagging. I don’t know whether it’s ever a dedicated job any longer, though, or whether the particular people only do that when it’s busy and do other work whenever the lines aren’t as long; I suspect the latter.