What Was Life Like In The Decade Of Your Youth?

1993. Moved from NC to northern Idaho, then moved back to NC. My graduating class had maybe a dozen people in it when I graduated… lemme see. Randy Weaver was big news because he lived about 10 miles away. When he won his trial, the paper ran giant FEDS LOSE! headline. Waco was about then, too.
Northern Idaho had a lot of regular people, some hippies and jerkoff California transplants, some weirdo rednecks, and a ton of neonazis. They warned the black kids never to run away from home.
Legend had it, D.B. Cooper’s lost millions were lying around in the woods nearby, somewhere.
The feds and local cops were finding big barns with massive grow operations in them. Crystal Meth wasn’t really a thing yet.
Back in NC, racism was a thing. Old timers remembered when blacks would step off the sidewalk and tip their hat to you, but contemporary ones would just kill you. Redneck kid with a confederate flag on his truck was boxed in by a few carloads of blacks and was killed. Army LT going into a Wafflehouse was beaten into braindeath for letting a door bump a black guy and his crew on their way out the door. Kenneth French shot up a local restaurant and killed 4 as the drunken beginning to what he intended to be a mass murder.
SGT Kreutzer shot up Fort Bragg and killed 1, wounded 20 during PT.
Guys joined the volunteer FD for fun and drove around at night goofing around on the CB.
We scored beers when we could, went to shows and nasty clubs. We drank like fish, but generally didn’t do drugs.
We watched Xfiles friday nights. We went to Myrtle Beach to get drunk and chase women.
We still had the great bands around, so I remember taking in Floyd and Rush and Steve Miller.
Lots of road trips at any time for any reason to any destination. Gas wasn’t over a dollar until 1998?
We ate Taco Bell and BK and cheap Chinese takeout and Papa Jon’s. Nobody knew that stuff was bad for you and a .85 burrito seemed like a good deal. I think 10$ got you a large 2 topping from Papa Jon’s.
The internet wasn’t really a thing. Computers were big and the most exciting things on them at that point were Wolfenstein and Doom. I didn’t use the internet until I was taught to in college. I didn’t like the internethannels were pretty limited and all below #40. TVs were still CRT boxes and my folks’ was a massive wooden box. much until after I was forced to use it in college. Most of us didn’t have our own comps-we had to use a computer lab. Online gaming was pretty much MUD, Multi-User Dungeon.
Cell phones weren’t that big and beepers were still pretty common.
TV came via a settop box that delivered maybe 50-60 channels, but went up to 99 on the box. The good c
Cars were still big. Folks in the South still liked driving big boats. I’ll never forget my friends’ mom’s Pontiac Parisienne. Younger people had little Taurus and Civics. Douchers drove IROCs. Soccer Moms (not yet a term) drove Volvos.
Grocery Stores were different-they looked much the same, but there were wayyyy fewer products. You had a couple options in OJ, for instance, but they used to all taste like battery acid until the FRESH SQUEEZED and GROVE STAND and FULL OF PULP! brands came along. There were maybe 3 options for everything, instead of an entire aisle of just yogurt. Eggs came from 1-2 brands, not AAA, Organic, free-range, Large or XLARGE farm, etc. You just got the white ones or the brownish ones. My mom only got skim milk, so it was just white-colored water as far as I knew. The first time I got whole, it was like rocket fuel. Now, there’s 20 options in that, too. And if you can’t handle the milk, the soy, coconut, rice, and almond are there for you.
Nobody bought coconut milk back then, either, unless it was in a little can for cooking some kind of “ethnic” food. I think you would have had to go to a Chinese grocery store back then to find it.
Back then-no such things as “ethnic” grocery stores.
Also, cereal- 20 options or so, all sweet. Grapenuts, Cornflakes, Special K, Raisinbran were your healthy options. Now, those would be considered unhealthy-you would buy your Organic Free Trade/Fair Trade all-natural flavorless misery-Meusli.
Coffee- Folgers. Maybe Choc-full-o’-nuts? Nobody ever heard of a Starbucks until much, much later. Tea? Nobody but old ladies drank tea. Coffee houses were for college.
Arcades were still a thing in the mall.
The best thing about back then was how simple everything was, even then. The Soviets were gone, but there wasn’t an Al Qaeda, terrorism was what Arabs did over in Israel or Beirut, or something. Lunatics, like Francis Fukuyama, actually theorized we were at the end of history and everyone was just going to embrace America. We lived in McWorld.
With that, I close.

Gilberts, back in ’68 I was still in middle school. There were little mom and pop stores in almost every corner of the neighborhood, run by old men or women. I recall a little old lady with hair like a cotton ball, she had a candy store, a small room no bigger than some shops in Disneyland’s Main Street. The big supermarkets had not expanded into the city and Kmart (never mind Walmart) had yet to roll into town. I say all this to mention that ethnic stores is all we knew, the biggest store on the southside was El Grande, a store the size of a modern house, about 2000 square feet not counting the back area. The Kmart at the city edge made everything laughably small and antiquated.

For me, in the 90s, gas was under a dollar. In 1998-2000, I was driving 60 miles to work every morning and when gas went to 1.21, I quit because it was too high. HA! Joke was on me.

First ethnic store I saw was a Korean grocery that opened up. Shortly, there were a lot more.

In the 60’s gas was $.21 to $.27 and in 73 went to $.45 to $.55. During the 1978 ‘crisis’ gas doubled to just under a dollar and fluctuated between $.80 and $.95 until late 90’s when it jumped to about $1.20 and bounced around the $1.15 to $1.45 until it began to rise rapidly in 2005. After that prices were all over the place, mostly in the $2.50 range (+/- $.25). I think the price hit $3.00 in 2010 and soared after that benchmark. These are the prices I remember, and I always bought the cheapest I could find.

We had no obese children, just a few “Huskies” due to 15 cent Hostess Fruit pies. Nobody ate pizza as it was from a box..Chef Boy-R-D, or Appian Way…local Meijers still carries the Chef brand. Boxed pizza will ward off zombies