My supermarket carries D cells, CVS and Walgreens carry them, hardware stores carry them, and I bet Target carries them too. They’re not in the checkout line displays where they stick some AA and AAA packages to get an impulse buy, but the stores have them. I suspect your experience is really “I never buy them, and they aren’t immediately obvious in my LOS, so I assume they don’t exist.”
ETA: Confirmed Target and Walmart list them as in stock at the nearby locations.
I’m reminded of political cartoon in the Christian Science Monitor during the mad cow outbreak: Two blokes eating in a pub and one says “how do I know these vegetables aren’t out of their bloomin’ minds as well!?”
There are Americans who proudly insist that their bodies don’t contain any mRNA and never will.
It would be “interesting” to magically zap the actual mRNA out of a few of those folks and watch their reaction. It would not take long.
No, what I meant is that I haven’t seen an electrical device that uses them since the 20th Century. Can you give us some examples of new tech that uses D cells?
I don’t know about new tech but certainly there are still several current devices that use them.
Off the top of my head, I have several flashlights, lanterns, a portable radio (for emergencies) that still use D cells, some purchased within the last few years. While I can purchase replacements for all of those that don’t use D cells, there’s also no good reason why I can’t just continue buying replacement D cells instead.
I was responding to LSLGuy who said “substantially no mainstream retail stores carry them”. Which is definitely untrue IME for both the batteries themselves and devices which use them.
My guess is that the sort of things that would have required D-cell batteries in years past have been redesigned to use a permanent Lithium-Ion battery today.
And other things that used to have D cells now have things like these in them:
We’ve got one motion detection light in a hard to get to hall space that’s powered by 3 D cells. I really should get rechargeables for it, but as is I replace the batteries once every 6 months or so. That’s the only reason we have D cells in the house.
I’m not 100% certain my new car includes an AM radio. But if it does, i am 100% certain that i cannot safely tune into it while driving. I’d have to dig through a bunch of menus and take my eyes off the road for way too long.
This is not a good solution.
It is, at best, one leg in a stool that needs other legs. And if we know that a lot of cars don’t have AM radios we are in a better position to address the gap than if we blithely assume they do, when they aren’t actually accessible.
I think it’s a stupid law passed by old men who remember listening to AM radio in their cars.
I have an LED portable lantern that can light up a small cabin that uses D cell batteries. And i bought new batteries for it somewhat recently. I don’t recall where i bought them, but it wasn’t hard to find them.
Yes, many of the things that required D cells in the past now use lithium ion but there are still a lot that actually do use real, honest to goodness D cells.
For example, a lot of those overpowered Maglite flashlights still do. Likewise, a lot of lanterns that for camping or for emergencies.
They haven’t all been replaced, not even remotely.
If you were to argue they should all be replaced with lithium ion or other cell types, I could see the argument and would even agree in many cases. But to argue they are vanishingly rare or nearly non-existent is to ignore reality
I also have a much older, fluorescent lantern that i use for the same purpose, that takes those giant square batteries.
I suspect those hold much less charge than a D cell, and are a strictly inferior trade off.
Old fashioned batteries are good for a device you only use once a year. They “keep” better than rechargeables.
That’s unfortunate. I just flick a switch on my steering wheel. I don’t even have to take my eyes off the road for a split second.
It’s pretty common in newer cars.
Now, if i set up the car today to have AM 530 be one of its preset stations, i could get there by flicking a button on the steering wheel. But… I literally haven’t used AM radio in decades. Why would i spend the time to preset some AM stations? And would i guess the right ones?
I don’t think my experience is unusual. I think the emergency management folks need to assume that a rather large fraction of the population isn’t going to get emergency AM broadcasts in their cars. Whether or not those cars technically have an AM radio built in.
Which makes for a fun fact that there was a short window where it would been possible for Abraham Lincon to send a fax to a samurai.
I keep waiting for the fax to die, but it’s still kicking. Is it our longest-lived technology at this point?
Or maybe that’s trains.
I made a thread in FQ. Thank you for the idea.
To change the subject, Nvidia’s CEO says it doesn’t matter if overreliance on LLMs causes kids to lose basic literacy skills, because he doesn’t know his own address or phone number and can’t get from point A to point B by memory.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jensen-huang.html
