Coffee. In the good old days, you could get good coffee in European enclaves in US cities. As for everyone else, it was Maxwell House. Now, it’s everywhere, and ordinary citizens know how to make drinkable coffee.
Sadly, my local Peets closed. But there are other decent coffee shops in the area.
But electronics, in general, are way better than Even q few years ago.
Medicine is, too.
How many people were getting free refills at McDonald’s anyway? More than half of their customers use the drive-through and more get take-out orders and they weren’t getting free refills. If lots of people were getting refills , I might be upset but if hardly anyone is getting them , I can see why they wouldn’t want to keep the self-service soda machines.
For certain values of “things getting worse” , that’s going to be very individual. For example, luggage fees. Nothing is ever free- if you aren’t paying separately for luggage fees or parking or whatever , that just means everyone is paying for those services. I’d just as soon have luggage included in the ticket price - but my kids never check luggage so they don’t want it all bundled together.
Is Boston Market getting rid of napkins completely or is it just that they don’t automatically put them in the bag for take-out orders? I ask because in NYC restaurants are not allowed to give you plastic utensils, napkins, condiments with take-out orders unless you specifically request them. I know people who are upset about this but I also don’t need a drawer full of ketchup packets if I’m bringing the food home.
I only use reusable bags and have for years. No. 1 they hold stuff much, much better, No. 2 they are sustainable and No. 3 on the charts baybee……they are cute!
I have a 65" OLED set as well, and yes, it’s super thin. But who cares? Usually I’m looking at it straight on, not on the side.
I don’t understand this logic. Air travel is safer and more reliable than ever, but because there are fees for checking bags it’s “getting worse”? As if the fact that you have to pay for a checked bag somehow outweighs the vast improvements in safety the airline industry has made in the past few facades? I’d say the opposite, that on the whole air travel is better than it ever was, in spite of little things like fees for things that used to be included.
And you’re ignoring things you get now that didn’t exist a few decades ago, like seatback entertainment screens with dozens of movies and TV shows that you can watch on demand. 20 years ago at best you got one movie for the whole plane, that you had to crane your neck to watch on the screens over the aisle, which started when the flight attendant decided to start it.
Seat pitch. I don’t give a crap about anything else. When you’re 6’2", nothing else matters. And yeah, yeah, pay for business. Sorry, corporate policy.
As I said, it’s the seemingly constant invention of new fees and the baggage is an example. Googling “new airline fees” brings up articles about recent regulatory action to limit that sort of thing because it’s apparently a problem. So yeah, I see this as an aspect of the airline experience getting worse despite gains in other areas like safety.
Earlier I used the term “preyed upon” in how I see the current consumer experience. When I see industries inventing fees or providing less value than they once did, that’s the phrase that comes to my mind.
But I take the points of those who see it differently. That’s why I began this topic. Hell, I’m glad for the counter examples.
A prime example is home security systems, especially security cameras.
20 years ago you had a very limited choice of low resolution (well under 1 megapixel) cameras that were a bitch to set up, had limited features and cost maybe $150 apiece.
Now you can get home security cameras with a ton of features that set up in a few minutes and have 3 or 4 megapixel resolution for 1/4 the cost (with no subscription required).
My home cable modem service has dropped $10 per month from 2 years ago, and doubled in speed. So, yeah, I’ll go with this one.
As for lawn tools, I can’t say it’s better… but I have a battery operated HAND HELD CHAINSAW.
I repeat: a hand held CHAINSWORD…err Saw.
The Warhammer 40k dreams of my teens love the thing.
And I may be an outlier on this one, but for me, a BIG improvement is bookshopping.
Growing up as a big reader in the 80s, my local area had a Waldenbooks in the “big” mall, and a bunch of used bookstores that were my haunts, but I had to go to each and see what had come in, what was available, and if I could only get books 1 and 3, or 2 and 4 of some big series, well, better luck next time.
By the 90s and aughts, there were the big chain megastores, like Borders and Barnes and Noble, but still the same sort of thing much of the time. Lots of the big, currently popular, but not a lot of anything else, and all manual searching.
Amazon was a massive win for me, although it has it’s own issues. And since I was an early (pre-kindle even!) ebook adopter, it’s gotten even better.
I can be nearly anywhere in the world, and get the next book in the series by using the cellular service on my tablet or just tether to my phone and get what I want, whenever I want it, and ever search for stuff I never knew existed!
YMMV, and I’ll never stop enjoying paper books as well, but dammit, having 500+ novels on my phone and every linked device on a whim is just too perfect for the me of 1986 who carried a literal duffel bags of books to visit family on Spring Break.
So, it is contrary to the thrust of this thread to question the climate/ecological/sociological/wealth inequity costs associated with some of these improvements?
I absolutely meant nothing about you. It’s one of my pet peeves that an absurdly large numbers of threads here veer off from the subject pitched in the OP to talk about something else, and very often subjects that are the opposite to the OPs question. Not only that but they do so very quickly, often in the first few responses.
It’s the nature of the internet and nothing I or anyone else can say or do will change that. This thread is just one of a million examples of people interpreting OPs in such a variety of ways that several different conversations seem to be running at once. This one appears to prosper by the variety and that’s the best part of the board.
Yeah, in our small local newspaper back in the 60’s there was usually a small article about someone babying his car so it actually hit- gasp!- 100000 miles. Now, that is normal.
My home internet is now 5 times faster. \
Yep, cars are more complex, but they now last longer.
Yeah, here in Socal were were lucky- we could get oranges, etc year around.
Yep. LED tech is amazing.
Thank you for asking this. I was having the same thought. Sure, it’s fun and convenient that the grocery store is now twice the size because they’re able to stock, say, pomegranates wildly out of the local season; just ignore the carbon impact involved in bringing them from South Africa or wherever. I get not wanting to be a bummer in the thread, but there’s a fine line between “keep a positive attitude about what’s genuinely better” and self-centered myopia. I don’t know where that line is and I’m not levying accusations against anyone, but it has been a nagging thought for me.
Cameras are fantastically better. I had serious film cameras and lenses in the 1970s, and have gotten back into it over the last couple years with mirrorless digital cameras. It used to be that only a few premium lenses in the product line would use an aspherical element or an extra-low dispersion element. Now I have a wide angle zoom with 14 elements (14!) of which 4 are aspherical. And a telephoto zoom with 21 elements (21!). My fastest lens is f/1.0, and it’s autofocusing. One of the camera bodies is 40 megapixels, lets me adjust the ISO/ASA speed from 125 to 12800, and has shutter speeds as fast as 1/180,000 seconds. It automatically compensates camera shake with tiny accelerometers and electromagnetically powered moving elements in both the lens and the body. It can automatically take a series of photos focused at slightly different distances to make depth of field perfect, or take a series of photos while moving the sensor around by subpixel distances to recombine into a 160 megapixel photo. Just insane stuff, from the 1970s perspective.
Public transit has gotten better. You can figure out how to get from Point A to Point B using Google Maps instead of having to navigate a bunch of paper schedules. Instead of needing exact change, you have a card that you tap when you get on the bus or go through the train turnstyle. There’s even an app that shows you whether or not the bus is running on time and how long it’ll be before it gets to your stop. More routes are running more often, and service has pretty much completely recovered from the nadir of mid-2020 when everything shut down and you had to call the office to reserve a bus ride two days beforehand.
I think it’s natural to interpret products or services getting better or worse as meaning getting better or worse for the people who use them (the consumers), but you’re right that there’s also the aspect of how other people (from those who provide the products or services, to the planet as a whole) are affected.
Battery operated lawn care tools have come a long way. Our push mower (Worx) is great. We also have battery operated weed wacker, hedge trimmer, leaf blower, and two chainsaws. My big chainsaw is a DeWalt with a 16 inch bar.I run out of power before the battery does. Our small chainsaw is a Worx product that has a long pole with the battery mount on the user end to reduce weight in the air. Love it.
When we replace our lawn tractor we will look at battery models.
True, but it has taken away my excuse. “Sorry, just saw your message, I didn’t have a signal” is no longer is believable.
I think you are saying your battery operated mower is better than the battery operated mower it replaced. I’ll say that my battery operated mower is way better than the ICE mower it replaced. Way less noise, way less effort to start, a lot light so less effort to actually mow. Same for the weed wacker.
Yes! When I gutted and redid my basement, I still had to work with copper in places, mainly to solder in the PEX fittings, but all the new runs of PEX were an absolute breeze. And I moved a drain and that was ABS which was much easier to work with than the metal it replaced.