I can still remember the sound of dot matrix printers in the tills of the late 80s and early 90s. Beeps of scanners, big clicky keypads and the cacophony of receipts being printed.
I also distinctly remember when they disappeared and were replaced by thermal printers or other tech. Suddenly there was just quiet beeping of scanners.
I also remember the days of payment by cheque. I remember my grandmother tearing out an unwritten cheque, handing it to the checkout operator, who'd place it into the till and it automatically printed the date, amount in words and amount in figures, then it would be handed back and signed. Cutting edge 80s tech lol
Did you have cheque guarantee cards? The checkout operator would write your card number on the back of the cheque. Effectively it was a "portable letter of credit" which said you were good for the amount on the logo on the card, often £150, 250 or 500. Once used, the cheque would be honoured by the bank, regardless of balance available, so it was as good as cash from the retailer's point of view.
The other piece of old shopping mall tech I remember was an absolutely prehistoric parking ticket machine system that was still using punch card tickets.
And since this is a laundry forum, that slight hint of dry cleaning solvent from the omnipresent dry cleaners that used to be in pretty much every shopping mall / shopping centre and main street. The began to fade away. I guess people don't wear as many dryclean only items these days and also tightening emissions rules have made in store dry cleaning a thing of the past here. Most of those services send your clothes off site to much bigger facilitates these days, and it's probably shrinking demand, economies of scale and ability to control emissions more tightly.
The other *big* change I’ve noticed over the years is food culture. The fast food joints and the once ubiquitous shopping centre (mall) cafes full of displays of fancy cream cakes, hot scones, clotted cream, pots of tea, filter coffee and various stodgy main courses made way for a lot of smoothie bars, health food and endless coffee chains both local and international.
The one store I really have strong childhood memories of is a long defunct Irish supermarket chain called Crazy Prices (it’s larger locations were called Super Crazy Prices). It had garish branding, really ‘crazy’ displays like robotic monkeys in the exotic fruit section and an in store DJ doing price an item promos. It was just really high energy and fun. They vanished when Tesco entered the market and swallowed them up with blue and white boring..
That and I miss the random Z list “celebrities” they would get in to open stuff and “exciting” outside broadcasts with local radio. I remember one of the supermarkets even had an in store kitchen which was used to do cooking programmes on the rather low budget local cable TV.
You don’t see as much of that anymore - it’s all online and influencers.
Nostalgia and the olden days … sighs, posting online on a 5G smartphone which has become an extension of my fingers and probably has more processing power than the endure 1980s.[this post was last edited: 7/9/2022-06:34]
