Stuff you took for granted that no longer exists?

[Confusednbemused]

Was saying to my daughter how I used to go to Boots or Superdrug and take free perfume samples to try at home before deciding what to buy and it occurred to me I've no idea when that stopped and the little strips of paper became a thing!!

What inanimate or service level thing do you miss which you used to take for granted?

Being able to go into town in the morning and spend the day shopping because there were so many shops to visit. Now it really is only an hour or two because there just aren’t enough shops to fill a day (in our town anyway)

I remember my grandparents that had an Essex country accent ( they were farmers ) and it is very rare to hear anything like it now

Walter's (later Burton's) Potato Puffs.
The most perfect crispy snack ever made.

Sandersons Throat specific. God knows what was in it and it tasted vile but it was the best for sore throats and hoarseness. My DDs refused to have it though.

Mainstream TV programmes. that didn't assume its audience were absolute morons with the attention spans of toddlers that needed to have everything spelt out to them in words of one syllable/with loud music, colours, and lights/accompanied by stories of peoples emotional 'journeys'

OMG....same!

Ha ha...yes! So true!

Ooo I don't remember those, but would love to try (being a sugarholic)!

Oh really? It's sad how things have degenerated. I'm glad (in a way) I'm too young to remember it being any different....what you never had you never miss and all that....
But still, it would've been nice to experience

@Snakebite61 To play devils advocate here I feel like every generation since the dawn of time has had this opinion about the ones that follow.

If you think just about the last century: when people stopped routinely wearing hats in public, when it stopped being normal for men to open doors for women, or when children stopped being so frightened of their parents that they’d never question or debate them the way they often do now. I imagine plenty of people at the time felt “decency” was disappearing then too.
The same goes for “common sense.” Kids used to be allowed, even expected, to leave the house alone, run errands, or get themselves to school. That freedom helped build street-smarts. Today we’re far more cautious, so fewer people get those same experiences early on.
Technology has also changed what common sense looks like. With so much information at our fingertips, expectations shift. Most people would now check Google Maps rather than unfold a paper map and step into traffic, but that doesn’t mean earlier generations (or the ones who still prefer a physical map) lacked sense, just that the common part has changed.

And plenty of opinions changing hasn’t been a loss at all: attitudes to smoking, the way women and children are treated (mostly), and what behaviour we consider acceptable have improved enormously. It’s less that decency or common sense vanished, and more that society keeps redefining what they look like. I don't disagree with you that some aspects I also miss, but feels harsh to judge present behaviours by past standards.

Even just in the last ten years, since brexit for example, a lot of what feels like lost decency or common sense is tied to visibility and technology. Political disagreement has become louder and more public since Brexit, especially online, so it feels harsher even if people haven’t fundamentally changed. Everyday etiquette has shifted to; phones, apps and systems now do things we used to rely on memory or judgement for. When those systems fail, it can look like people lack common sense, when really the definition of what’s “common” has just moved. At the same time, we’ve gained a lot in awareness around mental health, consent and fairness, which previous generations often lacked. Can argue it both ways.

Really?! I must try it! Thank you! 😘

Same where I grew up (not Essex). It’s been replaced with a really generic Southern accent, which I don’t particularly like, and the town itself is unrecognisable from even 40 years ago as it’s pretty much tripled in size and almost joined with the next town along.

Quite a few posters have mentioned department stores and shopping on high streets. I heard recently that TFL (and our appalling London Mayor Khan) have decided that they want to close Oxford Street completely to buses - it is already closed to cars. There is a "survey" on TFL but many assume that the closure is a foregone conclusion.
How do they imagine shoppers will be able to stagger the full length of the street with their shopping? The bus I use will stop at Marble Arch so I would be able to walk to Selfridges, but John Lewis is further along and it is already difficult to walk because of the sheer volume of pedestrians. Getting to Oxford Circus (to get to Liberty or Hamleys in Regent Street) is further still. In theory you could use the underground, but buses are much easier if you are carrying shopping.
They seem determined to kill our high streets and department stores.

It’s over a decade since I lived in London but I’ve always wondered why they didn’t pedestrianise Oxford St and just have two tramlines that went up and down the centre of the length of the road, and people just jumped on and off for free.

Being able to phone any organisation to complain, or for advice and speak to a helpful human being. Not a chat bot, not an online request form, not endless options before the call is terminated. No searching websites fruitlessly for phone numbers.

I agree, tramlines would work well - in the good old days we had the open-backed Routemaster buses which fulfilled the same function - but I think that they'd probably insist that we need to have so many "safely" features built in to protect us from ourselves that they wouldn't work. And by the time that they'd actually got through the process of approving them and building them I wouldn't be capable to jumping on and off anything.

Easy parking - even if it was paid parking it was so much easier to just buy a ticket and stick it on the windscreen and then it was up to the traffic warden to decide if you'd made a mistake with it or not.

I should add that I came back to London five years ago after fifteen years away and found the deterioration in the main shopping areas quite amazing. Knightsbridge really is the shopping area for oligarchs, there isn't much left in Kensington, and Oxford street has been decimated. Personally I don't enjoy shopping in malls as there are few independent shops, but they would probably be best option now.

Thornton’s chocolate mice.
My mum used to get me one as a treat when I was little. When I got older I’d buy myself one as a treat. Now Thornton’s is all but gone and I loved those chocolate mice.

Yep. I've had to download a few instruction books for appliances recently and they are missing the simplest things. For example the tumble dryer booklet writes that I should select "low heat mode" but there is no mention of this anywhere else. It probably means that I should select a programme with a low temperature, but why doesn't it say this? The associated app doesn't work well either, it keeps unpairing itself and certainly isn't intuitive to use.

My new humidifier on the other hand has both a comprehensive paper booklet and a downloadable app which pairs easily, stays paired and works injtuitively and instantly. I'd be happy to accept an app rather than a book if it always worked this well.

no one talks in that posh English accent either, you know like John Le Measurier or Arthur Lowe or that war time dialect from Winston Churchill or old black and white films.

there is also a new London accent coined by younger people which I find grating

Driving through central london in the 90s, and being able to park in London. Yes all the department stores and unique shops in Covent Garden.

My eyelashes.

I grew up in Essex and witnessed the accent changing. A lot of the older generation in the 1960s and 70s had either the Essex country accent - with a flat "A" - or a sort of middle class southern RP accent - some sounded more like the late Queen - including my DM, aunts and uncles... My school contemporaries on the whole just sounded southern RP, and most still do. The accent you hear frequently now is probably in part due to people moving there from the East End of London. We had quite a few people moving into our road from London over the years. I live in a northern part of England now, and people are often surprised when I say where I am from as I still have a southern RP accent, and am told I do not sound like I am from Essex, weirdly. My mother drilled enunciation into us when we were small so we did not let our accents "slip", I guess it stuck!

All the shops. All the ones that are gone cos the rent and rates are insane. All the individual rinky tinky shops with unique things in them. Everyone has been priced out of the market now and everything is homogenised and cloned.

The chance of getting anything at all as a bargain. The ability to live very cheaply if you are prepared to make sacrifices. It's near impossible to do that now because the cost of everything is hellish.

I left home at 17 and rented a 3 bed detached house from a farmer for 50 quid a month and I had the choice of several. If I wanted to do a bit of tidying up of the gardens and inside a bit, the first few months were free. Can you imagine that happening now?

My basic was £86 a week but with overtime I was raking it in compared to my outgoings. My mini took £15 to fill and it would last five weeks on a tank.