I haven’t seen postal carriers without uniforms here in Chicago.
Are you sure you aren’t seeing rural carriers, who are contractors and drive their own vehicles?
In my town they wear uniforms, but it seems like most of them wear them rather sloppily. Like, with the shirt untucked, or in the case of one woman mail carrier I saw, halfway unbuttoned and tied together at the bottom (admittedly it was a hot day and my neighborhood is still a walking route).
I really shouldn’t criticize them, though. I mean I work in the tech industry, which is kind of infamous for extremely casual dress.
All of our mail carriers wear uniforms around here. But I noticed the same thing - some of them look very sloppy. There’s a young mailman that delivers mail to my office. He wears his shirt hanging out, his pants look too long. Just really frumpy. I also notice that he’s continually talking on his cell phone as he does his walking route. I thought the postal service would have strict rules on dress and cell phones.
I don’t have a problem with chatting via bluetooth wireless earpiece, but what ever happened to the crisp tailored short sleeved shirt and shorts of the past sigh
Mail carriers still dress that way where I live.
Another thing that has fallen out of favor: company cars. Back in the 70s and 80s, it was pretty common for someone to have a company provided car if they did travel for a company, now it seems to be much rarer. Not unheard of by any means, but not something that middle class people see very often.
Growing up, my family did not go to restaurants very often. But I seem to recall a lot of restaurants seemed to present “After Eight” chocolate mint wafers with the bill. Was this a regional thing? It has been decades since I have seen this, and it was a higher quality giveaway than the cheap mints and bonbons occasionally given.
Which reminds me about the bowel of unwrapped mints by the cash register. Most dissolved pleasantly. Some chipped your tooth. But all would be much too ‘unsanitary’ for contemporary tastes.
Motivated by a thread here, we picked up my 90 yr old mom and went and found an old fashioned* Wisconsin Supper Club. Sure 'nuff, right next to the register was a bowl of tiny pastel “Butter Mints”… now with a spoon for 21st century sensibilities.
*yes, of course I ordered a Brandy Old Fashioned Sweet.
A bowel by the cash register definitely sounds unsanitary.
That’s another attitude that’s changed; though it had probably been changing throughout the 20th century.
But I started working in farm fields back in the 1970’s, and we used to routinely pass water jugs around from one person to another, everyone drinking from the same one without cleaning it inbetween; somebody who knew they were sick would generally abstain, but otherwise nobody thought anything of it.
By the late 80’s I had my own place; and at first, when I had others working here, I’d supply water in the fields in the same fashion; and again, at first everyone seemed to take this for granted. At some point in the late 90’s or maybe in the 2000’s people started looking at me funny and asking for separate cups, or maybe bringing their own water containers, so I started supplying separate glasses (well, plastics, so I didn’t have to worry about their getting broken). It was a while after that before everyone started going around carrying individual water bottles.
– hmmm. Do people still pass around joints and pipes from person to person, as was certainly common in the 1970’s? Or has that also fallen victim to the dread of germs?
We still pass joints, pipes, and bongs, but thanks to technology we also pass rigs for dabs.
There are sentences you can say today which contain words used in 1970 which makes ZERO SENSE to a 1970n:
“I used the bluetooth to connect my phone to the car stereo.”
That’s true, but what does it have to do with the topic? This thread is about old behaviors that have faded away in the last 40 to 50 years, not new behaviors that have arisen during that time.
Are there sentences that someone in 1970 would understand that would make zero sense today? That would fit the topic of this thread.
Wanna cop a lid?
Remember when 10 and 11 year-old kids could ride their bikes all over the place for most of a day getting into adventures such as finding a woman with dementia that wandered off? That never happens anymore.
What strikes me about that story is not that four junior detectives sprung into action but - apropos of this thread - they are not Bobby, Johnny, Susie and Sally but Kashton, Logan, Makenna and Hope.
NM
Except maybe a take-out haggis.
I seem to recall there was study done in the late 80s/early 90s that demonstrated that those bowls had the most urine contamination of any place in the restaurant.
In Googling, I’ve discovered that this might be a myth, from my own city. From 1994, which checks out with my recall above.