The video rental place closest to my house closed last month, and a casual survey shows that they are pretty much all gone here.
I remember back in about 1981 when the only place in town to rent videos was a hardware store that had one 4 foot shelf of them, half VHS and half Beta.
What types of business have arisen, become ubiquitous, and died off in your lifetimes?
Teddy Ruxpin. He was a teddy bear that talks and plays cassette tapes, and was invented in 1985 (when I was 1 year old). I’m pretty sure they’re long-since obsolete by now.
When I was very young I would shoot a role of film, and my grandfather would take it with him to drop it off at a camera store he passed in his commute. It would take 7 - 10 days to get it back.
By the time I was in high school there were half a dozen drive-up one-hour photo processing booths in the corners of parking lots near our home.