I remember when there were price tags on things at the grocery store. And you needed them, because there weren’t fancy barcode laser scanners – in fact, sometimes there weren’t even barcodes. Cash registers were mechanical and they would look at the price of your stuff and ring it up, and have to hit that NO SALE key to get the drawer to pop open if all you wanted was to make change. And then you had to open the doors yourself on the way in and out, because they weren’t always automated.
Soda came from vending machines in return-for-deposit bottles, as a rule, and you’d bust your knuckles trying to pull one out. At the grocery store, neither the 2-liter nor the plastic bottle had appeared; you could buy a 64 oz Dr Pepper in a glass bottle with a styrofoam label around it, and God help you if you dropped it. You had 10 ounce bottles, 12 ounce cans (just moving from steel to aluminum, and you could tell which was which by the seam down the side of the steel ones), or 16 ounce bottles (again with a styrofoam label) of the most paper-thin glass you could imagine, a perpetual threat around poolside or down sidewalks on a summer day, or broken in the mud of a ditch where someone had doubtless flung it from a car.
Of course, the drinks were smaller then. Small, medium and large at the fast food place, probably meaning 8, 12 and 16 ounces. The small now is the size of the large then. (God help you if you wanted a 20 ounce coffee – they would look at you like you’re insane, I’m sure, that was a triple serving back when Carter was President.) I don’t even remember if Diet Pepsi had landed – Diet Coke sure hadn’t, and Tab was pretty much the only thing going for diet soda.
Gas was leaded or ethyl, and while the price had spiked with the “energy crisis” it was still under a dollar a gallon, barely. Every gas station was a service station, a garage, a place to get your oil changed and the front end aligned and tired rotated or balanced, and they all smelled of grease. The completely-self-service quickie-mart gas station wasn’t a thing yet – only the one across from my grandparents’ church, and that seemed to be more a tiny grocery store that sold gas than a proper service station.
Four channels. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS. We didn’t rate an independent station; it was only around the time I was born that we rated a separate station for each network. As Foxworthy says, if the President was on, your night was shot, because of course all three networks would carry the President live. You bought your TV at the furniture store, and it sat on legs on the floor. And you were the remote control: volume, channel, vertical hold, horizontal and maybe tweak the antenna cable in a pinch.
Cars had bench seats in the front and lap belts only. A telephone was a thing in the house that made the same ringing sound in anyone’s house, and it was as likely as not wired directly into the wall; nothing modular there. McDonald’s was a twenty-mile drive, not the next exit over, and some place like Jack’s was a peer competitor with locations in four different states.
And here’s the thing – McDonald’s eventually closed the gap to ten miles, and soda got bigger and came in plastic bottles, and we got cable, but the abiding circumstances of the world didn’t really change that much all the way into college. It was only when I left for grad school, and acquired a cell phone and an email address and a post office box in another state, that the world was materially different around me. Which I guess is a big part of why it always feels strange to see that things in the old country are not dissimilar to now. Of course they have iPhones and boutique coffee and bike-share and wifi, because everyplace has those things now.
Maybe it’s future shock. Maybe it’s other extenuating circumstances. But it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if I could take a little vacation somewhere away from the bleeding edge for a while. Because Silly Con Valley really is where your future comes from, and I could do without plunging into this future just yet.