Recently, older adults of the BuzzFeed Community shared the common, everyday experiences from “back in the day” that would have Gen Z’ers and younger generations find difficult to believe, and boy, were the stories insightful. Here are the practices from the past that are practically obsolete, according to those who lived them:
1. “When I was younger, we only had three channels on the TV that we could watch. That’s it. There was no MTV or cable channels.”
2. “I had a TV Guide route. It was just like a newspaper route, but I would deliver the TV Guide once they were available at grocery stores.”
—Anonymous
3. “There really was a TV commercial that played at 10 p.m. that said, ‘Parents, do you know where your children are?'”
—Anonymous
4. “My high school had a ‘smokers hall’ that the students could smoke as long as they had a note from their parents. I was smoking at 16 with the approval of my mom.”
5. “The movie theater would give us kids a free ticket to the Saturday matinee for 10 used Popsicle wrappers.”
—Anonymous, 87
6. “I’m 49. I started first grade in the fall of 1983. I went to a private school and can confirm that girls were not allowed to wear pants there. This went on for me until the fall of 1990, when I was 14 and transferred to public school. At my new high school, there were outdoor smoking areas for students and teachers. The smoke room, as it was called, was still being used when I graduated in 1995. I heard they banned smoking on campus in the early ’00s. Even now, at Catholic schools and some private Christian academies, girls still can’t wear pants.”
—fabchef4371
7. “I went to Catholic school… Need I say more? I don’t remember them weighing us, but the principal of the school used to come around and do a bra check on us girls. I was very well-endowed in the eighth grade. Sister Catherine came right over to my group first, pulled the back of my bra strap, and said I had to go home and change my bra in front of the whole class! That the bra wasn’t ‘holding me up’ good enough. It was so embarrassing! I didn’t go back to school for the rest of the day. My mother told me I could stay home. Kudos to her!”
—laughingrocket34
8. “When I was a kid in the ’50s, I hated going to the dentist because they would drill cavities without giving any painkillers. Not much fun.”
9. “Sock hops in the high school gym. They were called sock hops because you couldn’t dance on the gym floor without ruining the finish of the floor on your shoes. My grandkids asked, ‘Grandpa, did you really dance like that?’ Yes, and for refreshments, we had apple cider and powdered sugar donuts. Those dances were tons of fun.”
—Anonymous
10. “The DDT cloud-spraying truck. I was an Air Force brat living on base in Guam in 1966. Our bedroom windows were open, but with screens to keep bugs out. But as I was nodding off to sleep, I would see the truck drive slowly down our street with a huge cloud spraying out the back of it. It was normal, and nobody thought otherwise. My brother and I would just drift off to sleep.”
—Anonymous
11. “In the ’50s, stores charged a two-cent per bottle deposit fee on each bottle of soda pop, which would be refunded to anyone who returned the empty bottles. Kids would earn money by hunting for empty bottles along roadways or in people’s trash.”
—Anonymous
12. “Wearing your shoes on top of your metal roller skates and adjusting them with a metal key. They fell off anyway!”
13. “You could write a ‘check’ on anything. It didn’t have to be an official check, either. As long as it had the correct information on it, it was fine.”
—Anonymous
14. “In my little town in the early 1950s, phone numbers had only three digits. If you forgot the number, the local operator, whom we all knew, could just connect you, telling them the name of the person you were calling! It was a different time back then!”
—Anonymous
15. “The milk man delivered milk and eggs to your door. Sometimes they’d deliver cheese or ice cream, too.”
—Anonymous, 64, Louisiana
16. “Our potato chips and pretzels were delivered weekly in tin barrels from a brown Charles Chips truck. I did not have chips out of a bag until I went to school.”
17. “Not locking the doors of our house. Anyone could walk in. When I was a child, my parents made me answer the door at night. I could have been kidnapped.”
—Anonymous
18. “You had to memorize about 25 phone numbers to be able to call your friends!”
—Anonymous
19. “When I was 5–6 years old, I was at a big department store in Louisville, where there was an X-ray machine in the lobby. You could slide your foot into an opening, push a button, and look through a viewfinder at the bones in your foot. It was free and easy. Must have looked 15–20 times.”
20. “Typing class. If you looked at the keyboard while typing, the teacher, who was probably also the assistant football coach, would throw a chalk-saturated chalkboard eraser at your head. He’d never miss, either. I type 80 words per minute.”
—Anonymous
21. “Party phone lines, where multiple parties were on the same line, and each party had a different ring tone, like two shorts and a long, for example. Anyone else on the line could eavesdrop on any and all communications. People would lose their minds nowadays if that were still a thing.”
—Ha, 81, Sacramento, California
22. “I was an elementary classroom teacher. After school hours, when the students were gone for the day, I would smoke in the classroom as I got ready to leave. Seriously! We also smoked in the teachers’ lounge during our breaks.”
23. “I don’t think young people know that movies used to disappear once they left the theaters. It wasn’t until the ’80s that movies became available for purchase on VHS cassettes. Mostly, movies would have just become forgotten. MAYBE a movie would eventually run on TV. If that happened, it would run at a specific time, and you had to be at home and in front of the TV to catch it. Late-night and afternoon TV would run old movies, too, but when I was a kid, I wasn’t interested in any of them. Mostly, late-night TV ran movies from the ’40s and ’50s. Though you couldn’t buy a full movie, some stories sold very short, silent summaries of movies that you could run on a home 16mm or Super 8 projector.”
“I bought one of these for When Worlds Collide, because the full movie wasn’t available anywhere. Sometimes, rather than a summary, they sold a memorable scene from a movie. I bought a Star Wars reel that turned out to be the ‘escape from the Death Star’ scene. These home film reels disappeared after buying movies on VHS became a thing.”
—Anonymous
24. “Pay toilets. I remember crawling under the stall door when I was a kid because I didn’t have any dimes.”
—Anonymous
25. “Grocery stores used to bag groceries for you nicely (with the bread on top!). Then, a clerk, mostly high school boys, carried them to the car and politely put them in the trunk! It was a job teens appreciated, other than running the newspaper routes. Moms appreciated those boys, too. I’d cry today if someone offered to put my cart back at the grocery store! I also refuse to self-check. I will die on this hill!”
—Anonymous
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