I sharpen my own. If you take care of them, it’s not a big deal IMHO. I just touch them up with a chefs sharpening steel.
For my pocket knife, I use a hand held sharpening tool. It’s a bunch of interlaced wheels.
Don’t have a lawn mower anymore. We don’t mow. But for things like an axe, an angle grinder works great.
My father never carved a Sunday dinner roast without first sharpening the knife with a “steel”. A half-dozen strokes and the job was done. He never trusted the knife-sharpening guys passing by on the street except to sharpen his manual lawn mover blades.
My friend is a timber faller for a living here in the great NW of Oregon. He has the tools to sharpen his saw blades and spends a considerable amount of time on his days off sharpening his chains, because they are necessary for his job.
I have a 16 inch chainsaw for yard and garden work. Which I use for about an hour or maybe two each year. I can take the old chains to the local saw shop and get them sharpened, poorly, for $15 each. Or I can buy a new chain for about $25 or less. I buy a new chain each year
I don’t think anything has been forgotten about sharpening. There were various levels of skill and complexity depending whether you were just a guy with a pocket knife or a tradesman with expensive tools. Maybe more people currently don’t know how to sharpen anything, but still lots of people do, with various levels of complexity and need.
The materials have changed; both of blades and of sharpening instruments. They did not have corundum or diamond stones hundreds of years ago, but they still had stones. They would have had strops, steels and other blade conditioning tools. I am sure if you needed something ground you would take it to the local black smith and his wheel. I would expect they ad some form of file for sharpening saws. They did not have High Speed Steel or carbide but they still had various grades of steel. Carbon steel is easy to sharpen.
Basic sharpening is pretty simple, all you need is a rock. You can revive a pair of cheap scissors by using them on a glass bottle neck.
And the problem with Maple is its high silica content.
At the barbers, when I asked him, he said they just throw the open razor insert away and put in another one, they make no attempt to strop it or regrind it.
People value the convenience of stainless steel over carbon steel, even though the edge it takes is often worse.
My shop class in 9th grade taught chisel sharpening. We turned wood projects on a lathe and the chisel needs to be reasonably sharp.
Just a good edge. Not razor sharp.
Arkansas whetstone ( Novaculite) are highly desirable. They are produced and sold fairly close to my house.
The first Bowie Knife was forged in Washington Arkansas.
In the case of a public setting like a barber shop, the bigger concern may be cross-contamination. One-use blades are worth it if using them avoids any possibility of someone getting infected. The same thing I think is true in hospital environments. Plenty of medical supplies are now one use where in previous decades they may have been used multiple times, perhaps with a trip through the autoclave between patients.
There was a grinder-mobile in our neighborhood as late as 1989 or so.
But I also remember how, in the 50s, we had spinning whetstones, first cranked, later electric. But there is also the fact that a good blade should be kept strictly away from whetstones, and sharpened with only a steel. And I remember, too, that we had a tool using two intersecting cylinders of stacked steel disks.
IANA expert. However, I know that sharpening techniques are in general a great way to start a religious flamewar amongst enthusiasts. Which is usually a sign that much of what passes for “science” is in fact “folklore”.
Anyhow, here’s my science / folklore on the snip above.
A good blade that is first sharpened to a very fine edge, and is then only used lightly, can be maintained almost indefinitely by a steel if the steel is used frequently. Said another way, a steel can touch up minor localized reductions in sharpness along the edge.
Once the knife has been well-dulled through long unmaintained use, gotten a barely visible nick in the edge from inappropriate hard use, or was never very sharp to begin with, using a steel on it is mostly fanwanking.
A blade like that needs to first be sharpened on a stone, then finished on a steel, then the proper maintenance via a steel can begin or continue as the case may be. But not before.
Whether the blade started out as a “good” blade has little to nothing to do with it.
My flame-resistant Underoos are properly donned. Fire away as you will, Good Sir. 
A steel generally is meant to condition the cutting edge by realigning little bends and malformations, rather than by removal of material. There are ‘steels’ made of harder materials that are intended to remove some material.
Eventually a cutting edge is going to get chips and other defects that will require material to be removed to make a fresh cutting edge.
Ooh, there’s a phrase that’s going to worm its way into my head and fester like a bad cold.
There’s this part of my brain that wants it to be “timber feller”. But then another part of my brain immediately snarks back, “Now, Cletus, it don’t much matter where the feller’s from.”1
So I guess “timber faller” is there to stay. Which isn’t all bad, actually. That part of my brain has spent the past six months obsessing pretty much non-stop over the phrase “an usual”.2 Some variety will likely do it good.
Well he is a faller first, after the tree is down he is probably a feller. 'Cause he fell her.
It is one of, and on some lists, the most dangerous job in the US.
FallerSafety_web_rev_Feb08.indd (ohsu.edu)
Logging Is Most Dangerous Job in America: See the List | Entrepreneur
My great grandpa died that way. Death by tree.
Sadly, that’s an usual death for them fellers what fall timbers.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^ — (See what I mean!?!?!)
“A usual” is correct. “An usual” is incorrect. It follows the same rule as every other case of “a” vs. “an”.
For my own economic circumstances, there are a number of gardening and yard tools that I’ve learned are easier to just re-buy than sharpen.
To elaborate, in the past I sharpened my chainsaw chains myself. Then one day I calculated the cost per hour of spending my own time vs. just buying new chains, and I’ve bought new ever since. Same with pruners, loppers, and a lot of other non-powered outdoor tools. When they’re too dull to be effective I just donate them and buy new. Then maybe someone who makes lower (or no wages) can invest their elbow grease to recover the value.