Here in California (and in a few other states), gas stations are required by law to provide free air to anyone who purchases gas.
But young people today will never experience the pleasure of smelling a fresh mimeograph.
At least in CA, they are required to offer free air and water to customers that also purchase gas.
Having idle curiosity about something, but instead of asking your phone or computer to google up answers in 5 seconds or less, you had to either
- Parlay some serious time to travel to the library and research
or - Shrug and forget about it
Door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen? Those must have gone by the wayside.
The old way of watching a movie:
Go to the theater it was playing at when it got released. You had a couple of weeks to do this.
Occasionally, you might get lucky and a popular winter movie might get a second release for the summer at the drive-in. It would usually play as a second feature after a new movie.
Wait until it was broadcast on TV. This would usually take a year or so. The TV networks (all three of them - ABC, CBS, and NBC) used to show movies during primetime. Which network got which movie was a big deal. But they edited the movies down for “family viewing” - no nudity, no swearing, no excessive violence.
After that, you pretty much were out of luck. TV stations would broadcast old movies at night or in the afternoons but you had no control over what was shown. There was no concept that you could own a copy of a movie like you’d own a book and watch it whenever you felt like.
My nieces’ grandad (a retired pediatrician) suggested to my bro and SIL that they go back to having a land line and push-button phones for a while, instead of just cell phones, so the kids know how to use a phone.
It might come up in future jobs, or even not-so-future emergency situations.
Movies being in a theater for more than two weeks. A really successful movie might be in the theater for months!
Also, second-run (dollar) theaters - do they still have those anywhere? Ours are long gone.
Waiting weeks for an item you ordered to arrive. Filling out a mail-order form by hand and actually sending it off.
Ha, half the books the Little One and I get from the library.
The most recent one involved Curious George getting into trouble at a train station because of “helpfully” mixing up the times MANUALLY placed by some train station worker on the board to show when the trains were coming in and leaving. I’m still not sure the Little One understands how that worked. It’s always been electronic screens for her.
Also recently we had the book about carefully counting how many exposures on a roll of film the main character has left… and the one about the extremely small baby puppy riding on the record player…
Having a passbook for your bank account and someone actually writing in it by hand any deposits you made with money grandma gave you when you visited.
Grocery store stamps.
Roller skates that snapped onto your shoes and had a key to adjust the size.
TV dinners that were worse than school cafeteria food.
Making sure you had those little inserts for your 45 records.
Why don’t we limit this to things that people under a certain age won’t have context for; a lot of these things on here are geezer-things that even people in their 40s don’t have context for- stuff that went out in the 1960s and 1970s like rollerskate keys, full-service gas stations, manual tuneups, etc…
I do think that these things are things that children today will have no concept of:
[ul]
[li]Phone books[/li][li]Non-DVR television[/li][li]Different formats of music for different places- CDs for home, tapes for cars.[/li][li]The idea that someone could call while you’re out, and the whole idea of an answering machine vs. voice mail.[/li][li]Film photography and the inconveniences therein.[/li][li]Non-online video games.[/li][li]Playing multiplayer video games in the same room as the other players. [/li][li]Actual mail-order catalog purchases as opposed to online shopping.[/li][li]All the technology and stuff surrounding paper documents - white-out, fax machines, photocopiers, etc… [/li][li]Long distance calling[/li][li]Dial-up internet[/li][li]Seasonal produce (as a kid in the 1970s and 1980s, I remember that a lot of fruit was only available in summer months, but now you can get strawberries or grapes year-round)[/li]
[/ul]
A couple of years ago, I wanted to know if the downstairs phone had been plugged in correctly, so i asked by then-ten-year-old to see if it had a dial tone. He picked up the handset and then said, “What’s a dial tone?”
You can get strawberry and grape shaped food items all year long. 
My niece is going of to college next week and I (jokingly) asked her if she had a message board for her dorm room door. “So when your friends come looking for you and you’re not there, they can leave a message that you’ll see when you get home.” I think she thought I made up that idea myself.
How about when the town 12 miles to the west was not Long Distance, but the town 12 miles to the east was.
Memorizing phone numbers.
Getting up and walking across the room to change the channel on the TV.
Making popcorn in a pot or a special machine just for that purpose.
Taking your car to a gas station for repairs.
I recently saw the results of an online poll, in which most of the respondents were under about 25. One question was, did they fear physical pain more, or emotional pain. A great majority said they are more in fear of emotional pain. I thought this was very much a sign of the times, having grown up in the pre-novocaine era of dentistry – a time when there was no such thing as political correctness and if somebody said something hurtful, it was just one of the things you shook off.
In those days, your teeth could be hurt, but not your feelings. Just the opposite today. Nowadays, one’s feelings are constantly on the brink of a precipice, but medical painkillers are there for everything.
The milkman
the scrap man
banana seat
wheelie bikes