Soda vending machines that dispense glass bottles. Remember those with the little glass door and you had to “pull” the bottle out.
4 wheel (non-inline) roller skates
Large downtown shopping areas in medium to med-small cities and towns (all malls now).
Bottles that dispensed “Sucaryl” (saccarhine) drops.
TAB soda (very rare)
Dot Matrix printers. They were everywhere once! Now they’re mostly for older POS (point of sale) retail systems or in back rooms for institutional multi-part forms.
My dad owns one of those hotel red and black shoe shine things - got it from the Sharper Image. He loves it.
I was just thinking about it last night - you know, you never hear about Elvis sightings anymore? They used to be what tabloids fell back on when the royals and Michael Landon hadn’t done anything lately.
Actually, that could be a good idea - if they used a Prescott core Pentium 4 for the CPU, you could use the waste heat to make the toast, no need for a separate heating element.
I have several $2 bills in my wallet right now. They still make them but the demand isn’t very high.
John Travolota has a very cool tricked out Boeing 707.
Dot Matrix printers are still used in the corporate and manufacturing worlds that I work in. They are the only ones that can produce multiple-part copies.
I have a new glass blender that I made margaritas in last night.
Are you talking about the ones with a handle/lever on the dividers that you lift up to break up the cubes? Those are great. You may lose skin to the metal, but at least you can get the damn ice cubes out of the tray. My mother has a couple of those that she got with the Fridgidaire dad got for her when I was a baby. That refrigerator is in their garage and still works. Comes in handy around the holidays.
Back to the OP:
Studebakers, DeSotos, or Ramblers…no big loss on the Ramblers though:)
Home delivery of milk. (For a while, ours was delivered daily right from the cow. (un)Fortunately, she died before I got the hang of milking her by hand.)
Those cans of compressed air that were sold to unclog drains. I forget what they were called, but the ramifications of not using them correctly probably led to them being yanked off the market for legal reasons. I imagine that quite a few people used them to get rid of a clog in one sink, went to another sink in the house, and went “How the hell did this muck get all over the place?”
Fizzies.
Wood burning kits…no, no, no, not that kind…The ones that had a tool that looked like a big soldering iron you were supposed to use to char designs on pieces of wood. Can’t imagine why that isn’t sold any longer;)
When I was a kid, every weekend you could hear the ice cream truck making its rounds. Now that I think of it, I haven’t seen or heard an ice cream truck in years.
I’m Canadian, ours got replaced with toonies a few years ago.
I got a wood burning kit a few years ago as a Christmas present. I never did much with it though–Dad has it now.
I was half expecting someone to post ‘sea monkeys,’ partly just so I could say that I actually have seen them just today. There’s a store downtown that sells them.
And my parents still get home delivered milk, in some areas it’s a practice that’s still alive and well. We had a thread on it not too long ago.
Another addition–you used to be able to get really small bottles of pop. Haven’t seen them in years, but now they’re bringing it back in can form. Which of course begs the questions, ‘why’d you stop in the first place?’
Twin-lens cameras
Instamatic cameras
Flashbulbs/flashcubes
Bumper jacks
Hand operated water pumps
Lawn mowers started with 2 feet of rope with a wood handle
Beer cans that required a ‘church key’ to open
Rabbit ear TV antennas
Digital clocks that had flipper number panels
Fender skirts
Curb feelers
8mm home movies
Manual egg-beaters
Motor oil in quart/gallon cans that needed the piercing spout
8 tracks
Bosco chocolate syrup (little toy under the extended top)
The Fuller Brush man
Mimeograph machines (yes, I’d sniff the papers, too)
Crystal Bic pens for 19 cents (and their ads, too)
John Cameron Swayze pitching Timex watches
Cartoons before movies
Oil-checking, windshield-washing, headlight-cleaning gas pumpers with free air
Charge card imprint machines that took a three part form-manual roller to operate
Carbon paper
7-11 stores that were open from 7AM to 11PM-not 24 hour
Cigarettes with coupons on the back of the pack
Burma Shave signs
I haven’t seen anyplace that has the old glass percolaters. My mom broke hers, years ago, and couldn’t find one. But they still populate garage sales, so she’s got quite a collection now, from little 4-cuppers up to the big 8-cuppers. I got mine from her, and I agree with you, the coffee from a percolater tastes better than that from a coffee machine.
Wax lips. I suppose only middle-aged dorks buy 'em now, in a handsomely packed gift box that costs about $4.50 per pair.
Silver dollars and 50¢ pieces.
Brown high boots for the horsy set. Nowadays they’re only worn in the show ring, where they have to be black.
Those kicky low-rise cowboy boot things women wore about 1995.
Collect calls. When was the last time you made one? Can you still call collect without dialing some number that begins with ten? Can you still even dial ten?
Ice cream sold in cups covered with paper, supplied with a wooden “spoon.”
Speaking of ice cream: Rufus Xavier mentioned he hadn’t recently seen it sold out of a truck. I can only conclude he lives outside the greater NYC metro area, where Mister Softee is still such a force in the culture that it’s actually hard to find hand dipped ice cream sold by the cone in a parlor. Mr S is less famous for the quality of its product (which all tastes like it’s shot from air guns) than the annoying loudness of its truck-top speaker jingle. I can personally attest that a passing Mister Softee truck once drowned out the 100-ton Riverside Church carillon, the largest such instrument in the world at the time.
Checker “Marathon” cabs…plus driver wearing uniforms
-phone booths (everybody has cell phones now
-tooth powder
-recycled motor oil at gas stations (in glass bottles)
-chinese laundries
-car hops
-HEATHKIT “do it yourself” TV kits
-garbage collectors
-democratic politicians
-Communist organizations; the “DALY WORKER” newspaper
-Cub Scout uniforms (remember those fetching little beanies?)
