Come to Jersey, there are still some petrol filling stations where they fill up for you, AND they have a dish of sweets near the till so you can have a fruit toffee while you wait to pay.

Lol, I too remember most of these things.

Come to South Africa as well, we still get our petrol filled for us, oil and water and tyre pressure checked


Living in a small rural town also has its benefits in that we still can have our milk, booze, groceries and meat delivered with just a couple of phone calls.

Do you remember using 78rpm records to make 'fruit dishes'? Heating them in very hot water as I recall - not that we actually put fruit in them.

Here's a link to a website giving dried egg information. It was 1942 they brought it out and actually people liked it for scrambled egg etc,.
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/dried_eggs.htm

I've just remembered the 'shop' which was in my nana's neighbour's front room in the middle of a row of terraced houses. They sold sweets and pop (maybe other things too, but that was all I was interested in).

I loved the Richard Digance link, by the way.

I remember going shopping with my Grandmother, and in this shop that she liked to get her clothes in they had this system with the money. You gave it to the assistant who served you, she put it in a little metal can, attached it to a pulley, and then it whizzed off on these overhead lines to a big booth high up in the centre of the shop. There a cashier took out the money, put in the change and the receipt and sent the can back to the assistant. When they were busy there were dozens of these little metal cans whizzing around overhead all over the shop. Must have been quite a complex system to ensure each can went back to the right assistant. Used to fascinate me though. Sometimes the assistant would let me put the money in the can and attach it to the pulley.

They used to give you a chair to sit on while you waited to be served as well.

Rossian..........still got a couple of those old black flat irons, kicking about in the garage somewhere! Remember my mother heating them up on the cooking range and spitting on them to see if they were hot enough!

Off topic a moment...........totally agree with you regarding current "self service" fad in supermarkets.
It doesn't take rocket science to work out that if they can get unpaid customers to do the job of paid check-out operators, then the supermarkets can make staff redundant.
Thus saving then from having to pay wages, thus making "mega-bucks" more profit. For that reason I refuse to use them.
Btw.........it is already happening........my local supermarket has 40 checkouts, 3 of which are "self service", 1 is "Basket items", and usually only 6 out of the remainder open. I realise it isn't cost effective to have them all open at slack periods, but even with run-up to Christmas, when the store was heaving, they seemed to have more closed, than open!

Ok back to thread theme...............

Shoes are now made so cheaply in the Orient that Cobblers are rare in their old form. I remember going to our local cobbler and watching him cut to size thick hide and then sew them on for new soles on shoes. You could drop your shoes off (Your Special occasion ones) and they'd be glad to spend slow time polishing them for you for a nickel. Pick up the next day. And shoe laces replaced if needed. Yah, back then our shoes went in for routine maintenance like our cars do now. Today we just wear them out then throw them away and get a new cheap pair of plastic manmade material ones.

I'm only 21, so there's not so much of a stark difference between my childhood and childhoods of today, save all the kids with iPhones and laptops and things. Here are a few things I can remember that don't happen/happen rarely now:

Penny chews.
Ten pence mixes.
I remember we only had five TV channels: BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5.
Portable cassette players were the norm. I know, I know, it's not quite a record player or something! I'm surprised that they are still sold, actually.

It still seems like another lifetime - things were so different back then, even for me!

There was a shop near us like your grandmother's Rossian... it too sold sweets and pop but this one was run by two middle-aged sisters. There used to be some fruit chews that were four for a penny. The two sisters tried to sell me some. For a penny each! I still remember my shock at learning that some adults would try to rip off a kid - but they never got a penny of my pocket money again, or even a farthing. I've still got a farthing somewhere.

Round the corner from them there was a hairdresser's. Its windows were "whited" out apart from one small sign, which read:

FRESH
FISH
MILK

I still want to know what sort of fish give milk!

Newspaper headlines and street signs were the first things I could read. One street sign is still known in my family by the way I read it out loud the first time. "Mum," I said, "what's a polissy notissy?"



And those shop pulleys! They had them in a department store at home, I used to watch mesmerised. When I went to Japan in the 1980s they were still using them in some stores, on the Ginza no less.

I remember when a super fast modem speed was 14,400 bits per second. I had that much to the annoyance of a friend who only had 9,600 bits per second - and he had already replaced his slower one.

For the curious, a 20mb file would take only 3.1 hours to download on my fast one.

I ran a web design agency with a 14.4 modem, lol. When we first started, the government paid me to do presentations on the new idea of using websites in business - whenever I clicked on a hyperlink and a picture appeared I could hear jaws drop all round the room.

On my 50th birthday someone e-card bombed me and it took virtually all day to open the wretched things!

I remember when gas was 15 cents a gallon.

I remember when department stores had uniformed elevator operators.

I remember when family doctors made house calls.

I remember when a loaf of bread was 10 cents.

I remember when a 'milk man' delivered all dairy products to your home.

I remember, when purchasing gas at a service station, the attendant would automatically clean your windshield and check the engine oil and water.

I remember separating mail into 'air mail' (for quick delivery) and regular mail for ground (slower) delivery. As I recall, air mail was 3 cents more than regular mail.

Vendome, in the UK most places can still get milk delivered - and the milkman will also deliver things like juice, eggs, bread, cereal, pet food, and a whole range of other things. I never use enough milk to even think about having a milkman, but I do have a vegetable box delivered once a week - and the veggie man also supplies juice, bread, meat, cereals, and a lot more. My basic box includes five different sorts of vegetables and three different sorts of fruit, all organic; plus I can tell them what I don't like and they'll replace it with something I do. Oh and the veggie man also delivers milk, cream, butter, etc. All possible because of the power of the internet.

I remember mail too. Two of my mother's sisters married Cornishmen so they lived about 175 miles to the west of us. The rest of her family lived the same distance to the east so we could literally meet them halfway. One of my aunts would send my mother a postcard one evening and we'd get it the next morning "arriving 2 o'clock" it would say so we'd go to the railway station, buy a platform ticket, and chat to my aunt for half an hour while the train waited for passengers off a connecting train. On other occasions, an aunt would write "meet the train" and we'd arrive to be met by the guard who'd hand over pints of Cornish cream, pasties, simnel cakes, all sorts of freshly made goodies. Nowadays, with all the modern improvements, a letter sent today with a first class stamp (when I was a kid we just had stamps!) may arrive, oh, sometime this week if posted by Tuesday. With luck and a following wind.

The milk man brings out so many memories -- I guess they should be called "the good old days." Things seemed so much simpler and pleasant. Today you can't find a 'grocery store' or a 'market' where I live. We have these huge mega-stores with restaurants, sushi bars, auto repairs and other areas that make running in for a loaf of bread a time-consuming and an out of breath undertaking. So the latest 'innovation' is shopping via the internet; every item in the store is available for delivery for a $5 to $10 fee. It can take an hour to use the computer if you need a lot of items.

Why is it that progress can make things so much more complicated?

And doctors still make house calls here. Fortunately I haven't had to call for a home visit since having my stroke but when that happened it was a Saturday morning and my friend phoned the doctor, my GP was with me soon after she called.

The main difference in that now is that if it is 'out of hours' the doctor will have a driver for security reasons apart from anything else. It is now 12.40am here, so the middle of the night, if I phone for a doctor, if I was feeling ill, s/he would be with me in less than half an hour. The other difference now to years ago is that the doctor might not be my own doctor, in fact it could be virtually any doctor as all the practices run an our of hours co-operative after 7pm weekdays and from lunchtime Saturday until Monday morning.

We always moan here that doctors don't make house calls any more but actually they do. One of my great-nieces became very ill the day after she returned home with her new baby and she had paramedics, an ambulance, and a doctor with her very quickly. Then she got rushed straight to Papworth, blue lights flashing, for emergency admission and a full set of cardiac tests with no messing about. And all this on Christmas Day!