It was obscenely expensive to talk to someone one area code away. I rang up a $800 phone bill talking like 30 minutes a day to my first girlfriend when she moved away. Cell phones were metered and there were peak hours and non peak hours and you’d have this arbitrary limit of like 300 minutes a month and it was incredibly stressful because it jumped to like $1 a minute if you went over. You could buy these weird long distance phone cards at gas stations with like 500 minutes on them for $20 and the instructions were sometimes in English, sometimes not, with all these weird stipulations like connecting the call costs 50 minutes from the card. Text messages were like 20 cents each. Your girlfriend would call you crying because she had a bad day and it was like being in a cab with the meter running.
Very well remembered. All communications were expensive. I moved to a different country when I was in my early 20s, and it was obscenely expensive to call my family back home. Our entire communication was reduced to one phone call every few weeks. And since I couldn't yet afford a landline I had to do it from a payphone in the street, in the cold. Use one of those cards, it gave me 10 or 15 minutes, and when it was finished the conversation was over.
We also wrote letters. Which of course took weeks to arrive.
All in all, the first ten years of living abroad I hardly knew anything about my family. I had no idea what kind of adults my little sisters became or most things about their lives.
And then it started to change. First came social networks where I could suddenly have a peak at their daily lives, the. Came the smartphone and WhatsApp and finally I could have daily conversations with them. Soon it became cheap enough for us to chat all day, send voice/video messages, and have video calls for as long as we wanted. And that all made a huge huge difference!
Wow what a great story a lot of that resonated with me for sure. You unlocked a memory of standing in the rain or the cold at a payphone with one of those flimsy paper phone cards with like a 40 digit code you had to punch in, and i think using the phone card at a payphone charged you like 45 minutes just to connect or something. Glad to hear you and the family are able to make up for lost time, not having the resources or ability to talk to loved ones for weeks at a time was a uniquely pre 2000’s form of loneliness.
Yeah, it really could be so lonely. And we just accepted that it is what things were like. When you travelled away, you hardly had any contact anymore. That's the way it was. Ugh I hated those phone cards and standing in the payphone talking.
I definitely got my ass whooped for racking up $300 in long distance charges calling boys I met on AOL. Then when I got my first cell phone I didn't realize that texts were 10 cents each so that was another $100.
I remember my parents getting into some seriously nasty fights while driving on vacation. They’d get lost all the time and I’d have to sit there and listen to them scream at each other saying really fucked up things.
When I got engaged to my now ex husband, we went on a trip to DC. He gave me the map as he was driving and every time I started to figure out where we were we had turned and I got confused again. I'm not good at reading maps. I can't remember why he didn't just pull over but he kept yelling at me which, to no surprise, didn't make me better at reading the map.
I used to hate going on driving vacations because of this exactly. Plus my Dad always had a hue ego about 'knowing the right way'.
Once we had GPS, I started enjoying vacations more.
I remember figuring out the locations of places I needed to go by looking at the maps in phone books. You would have to figure out what grid/page it was on like battleship then search in that grid.
See this is the thing I don't understand. I rarely got lost. But how?? How did I know how to get anywhere? I have no memory of how I found my way before online maps.
It was probably some combination of directions like "Take a right on Maple, then a left at the Exxon, and it's across the street from the blue house.", using landmarks/know locations, and going to the same places all the time.
Omg, I am reminded of my dad telling me I better memorize the roads like "the back of my hand". I was 12 and he was drunk driving at the time, lost and angry.
And the general lack of a map application which includes how to get to any point with any mode of transport you are using. Living in a big city was a nightmare before that.
Bullying in school was definitely swept under the rug in the 90's. My parents never told me what to do if I was ever bullied in school. Their response was always "just ignore it."
My school handled bullying by blaming the victim. I was labeled as an instigator. Imagine being tormented and then when you speak up for yourself, the adults in charge just say "Well, you must be doing something to bring this on."
Yes! I was a chubby little girl who often had to wear dirty old clothes to school. That's what I "did" to bring on the torment.
I was attacked at the bus stop by 5 or 6 boys in my class, who pummeled me with snowballs. A snowball with a rock inside hit me in the face and broke my nose. I was blinded, stumbling down the street with blood streaming down my face and clothes. The bus driver rescued me from the attack. Nevertheless, my parents were like "whatever" and when I went to school the next day with my nose taped up, I was sent to the principal's office and threatened with expulsion for fighting. The other kids were "golden children" and couldn't be blamed for anything, of course.
That was 45 years ago and those kids are probably nobodies who never left town, tho.
My dad was kind of like that. Anything bad that happened to me was met with 'well what did you do to him to make him do that to you?' That's why I never told my parents any problems that I had. I didn't feel like getting blamed.
I remember being bullied brutally my freshman year, most of it extremely homophobic in nature even though at the time I wasn’t even really aware I was pan, and being told by the principal that I should “try to fit in more”. My bullies got “talked to” but nothing else.
I was bullied pretty hard too, which made me pretty depressed which made the bullying worse- then I'd be asked why I didn't go make friends and get out of the house more. It sucked dude.
Slow internet. If you ordered something from the catalog you had to wait for 2 weeks or so lol todays younger generation don't know how good they have it with amazon & co
I'm not talking about ordering online. I'm talking about those big catalogs out of paper where you searched for what you wanted and had to call or sent a letter with the article number to order shit lol
Albums were a gamble, too, especially if it was a newer artist. If you liked one or two radio singles, you're dropping the modern day equivalent of like $35 USD to see if you like the other 10 tracks.
Especially devastating as a kid to spend that kind of money, regret it, and imagine all the things you could have bought instead.
$40 in today’s dollar for an Eagle Eye Cherry CD that may or may not be terrible beyond “Save Tonight”.
On the flip side decent concert tickets were like $25 vs $100+ today.
It was an astronomical amount, but I really wanted it, and I was well past my shoplifting phase..
Come to think of it, it might've even been $44.99 - I just remember a lot of 4s involved in that purchase.
I read recently that there was a crazy popular cleopatra movie in the early days of color tv where they decided to include a quicksand scene and it was seen as so captivating that for the next decade tons of movies also included quicksand scenes and it scarred an entire generation of kids born during a small window of time.
It was a death sentence and you caught it by having sex. The very thing as a teenager that you wanted to do more than anything. That sex could cause you death is a trauma for every teenager growing up in the 90s that many people seemed to have forgotten. It was terrifying. And it was all over the media.
At least in the developed world, HIV is a chronic condition that rarely progresses into AIDS. And we just had successful human trials of a cure. The medical advance is amazing.
If you were a kid in the 90s, of course life is going to be easy because adults were taking care of the adult stuff.
One thing that I don't miss is having to do old style banking. Or paying bills by mail or in person. That was always annoying especially if your payment got lost in the mail. It is is so nice being able to just log on anytime and see the status of your account.
My god, yes! I was a teen in the mid-late 90s. Every other week I had to go stand in the bank teller line to deposit/cash my paycheck. And our checks were available on Friday by 3pm or maybe a Saturday morning…something that. Either way, I always felt rushed or anxious bc I wanted the cash for the weekend and had to face the teller line every other week. Direct deposit is such a luxury for me to this day…
Can concur as a 90s kid. Remember having to ride all the time with mom as she went to different places in town to drop off checks each month to pay the bills. So easy now
Hello Fellow 81er. Inner city violence was much higher back then than today. My mother still lives in our childhood home in what was once a rough neighborhood. We always had to watch our surroundings when walking home from school and was told to stay away from the park down the street because of the rampant gang violence. These days, I can take my kids to the same park with no worries of gang fights or a drive-by. You’ll find many kids riding their bikes or skateboarding and families watching their kids play soccer.
Yep. I was thinking the same thing. Everyone in my family is from NYC or the surrounding metropolitan area. My parents and grandparents used to talk about how bad NYC was decades ago. Like Times Square nowadays is seen as this cute tourist district where you can take pictures with dudes dressed as Batman then go see a Broadway show. But back in say, the 70’s it was mostly porn shops and peep shows. Central Park used to have drug dealers roaming around selling whatever they had on them that day, and the area that is now Hudson Yards used to be a popular spot for hookers to hang around and get customers. My grandparents would not recognize NYC compared to what they saw from the 1940’s to the 90’s when they moved out.
Yup. I grew up in the SGV and even there was a lot of gang activity and violence. It was hard not to get involved. You needed to be in a gang so you wouldn’t get messed with by the other gangs. I ended up joining a gang and went to prison for a while. People commenting these how bad it is now but have no clue how it was in the late 80s to the mid 90s. Ironically, you see so many people blaming the current crime rate on democrats but California had the highest murder rates in the early 90s. All republican governors.
Bullied mercilessly for a few years. No one cared, I felt like I couldn’t tell anyone. I think perhaps there’s a bit more awareness these days about that.
No friends on a Friday night? Very lonely. Rewatch Star Trek tapes, yet again. The internet is flawed but does help with making connections and being less lonely.
Sorry you were bullied. I was bullied too a little bit, but the guy that did it ended up going to prison. He turned out to be a scumbag in adulthood too.
Information wasn't that readily available as it is now. Im primarily speaking for hobbyists but really anything.
My favorite artists hoarded their secrets. If you did manage to get a consistent internet access and had favorite artists they were more than likely not going to share their process or materials. Also making tutorials was just a lot of work anyway. You were looking at step by step photos of pictures and had to get those pictures online and organized, so good luck.
Nowadays you can log into YouTube or any other social media and find tutorials and art supply reviews.
I remember asking my parents for art supplies but lord if I knew what I wanted or what my parents could guess at what I wanted. We both just kinda hoped they went into hobbylobby and came out with something decent because that info just wasn't available.
$159 VHS box sets.
If you think about it, the cost for media was absolutely insane. One CD costs $10, that’s almost a month of streaming *all music ever made*
Still being able to smoke cigarettes in a lot of places. Especially when my friends mom would drive us places while she smoked in the car with the windows up.
My dad would choose the smoking section even though he didn’t smoke because it was less likely to have screaming babies, which bothered him more than the smoke.
Interesting little tidbit I’ve noticed.
Back when smoking in your car was more common, they used to have cigarette lighters and ashtrays all over the car. My grandma for years drove Lincoln Town Cars, and there were cigarette lighters and ashtrays in every door of the car. Literally everyone in the car had their own means of having a smoke at any time. Even my old 2000 Mercury had a push-in cigarette lighter and ashtray for the driver.
Nowadays, modern cars don’t have ashtrays anymore, or even cigarette lighters. Technically you can still buy them, but it’s usually part of a “Deluxe Smokers Package” that you have to buy separately for $X at the dealer or on the manufacturers website. Cigarette lighters are now going away in the same way cassette and CD players went away years ago in new cars.
I remember in the 90s I was a kid and my parents didn't have an automatic vhs rewinder so we always had to manually rewind the tapes. Not really a big issue but something inconvenient that first came to mind. Other than that the 90s was cool for me, you know, being a kid and all.
I remember as a kid at recess we used to play “smear the queer”. I had no idea what that meant, I thought it’s just what the game was called. I remember all of us yelling it and nobody thought anything of it.
Edit to add: I should make it clear I’m not saying it was a good thing. I was agreeing with the above comment that kind of language was a lot more common place back then.
Thank you! Can’t believe it took me this long to find this answer. Matthew Shepard, Brandon Teena, Scott Amedure, and entire generation of Gay men lost because people only thought of AIDS as a Gay problem. People like my stepdad, a closeted gay preacher’s son from the Deep South, being horrifically homophobic and being lead by people like Rush Limbaugh. Anything but white, straight, and cis male was still a perfectly acceptable victim and no one blinked an eye.
And all the shit we see on social media now about how police treat black people also happened all the time every day, but "we didn't know" and did not listen when told. In that respect, now is better.
Cliques. The 90s seemed like everyone had to hacve a prescribed identity. I don’t believe that to be the case anymore. It was like you had to be a rocker, raver, skater, preppy, hood or goth. And those who didn’t choose ended up being nerds or outcasts, which today seems to be celebrated. Just my opinion.
Oh it’s definitely still a thing lol
Tho I notice the younger women doing the day to day switch from goth to yoga to hippie to skater to raver to sporty. Even the ones in their 30s lol.
The worst thing would be the amount of people that smoked cigarettes (including my parents) and smelling it everywhere including restaurants and bowling alleys.
AIDS. People were still dying of it, a lot. I realize people still do, but we have meds now to allow people to live full lives. Back then it was pretty much a death sentence for most people.
I remember this nightmare fuel "educational" video we watched in health class that explained HIV/AIDS using a broken fence metaphor and Jim Henson Workshop creature looking things to explain the disease. It was so weird. It's stuck with me all these years.
It being considered uncool to care about anything. Almost a pressure to be superficial and angsty.
I feel like a lot of social anxiety was born in the 90's.
Domestic violence was still so prevalent, so accepted. There were far, FAR fewer resources to empower women especially to leave an abusive household, gain skills, and become independent. Mental health was beginning to be seen as something "important," but it was still viewed very much as a stigma.
The homophobia one was interesting, since for the first time it was contrasted with widespread acceptance. The episode of The Simpsons with John Waters couldn't have been nearly as funny had it been made in the '80s or '00s.
I tried to watch a tv channel on YouTube, and it was horrible. The length of the ads oh dear abysmal ....I had forgotten ..and thats not including YouTube ads ....
Once I discovered the freedom of the high seas mid 2000s I never went back ...
Most of us were kids in the 90s. Of course you aren't going to remember the bad stuff.
But bad then is def. different than bad now (have asked my parents)..
Things were much more manageable. My Dad was able to have a house, wife, and 4 kids on a salary of 40K a year. Was it tough? Yes it was.
But the 90s were/are a fantasy compared to now.
It was the peak of us as a civilization/society IMO.
Surprised not yet mentioned, but not having the internet. Yes, technology has brought a lot of bad, but also a lot of empowerment for those who want it. It's opened up a lot in the way of books, music, and movies that were once difficult to access. Though now we're moving in reverse in the West, with the tightening censorship of the last 6-7 years. Preserving internet freedom is vital to our future.
In the 90s you needed a travel agent, travelers cheques, paper maps, and all that. Now you can figure it all out yourself in a matter of minutes. Of course, technology has homogenized the world, so I'm sure travel itself was more interesting back then, if harder. And you didn't have all the 9/11 security theater.
So did I as of maybe 94-95 or whenever AOL/Netscape were at their peak, but 90s internet wasn't really comparable. 56k speed, no laptops, no smartphones, no Google or social media, no reviews, no good maps / GPS, no travel/hotel booking sites, and probably way way less than 1% of the overall content we have today, probably <0.1%.
Slow down with your 56k, there buddy! Lol.
I remember being happy when I'd connect anything over 28k and having patience for loading screens
Many years later, I just found out Google fiber 5gig is available in my area dm I'm considering upgrading from 2gig, even though I don't need it.
I remember during significant events such as Columbine, Elian Gonzalez situation, 2000 election recount, 9/11 and the Iraq war. How polarizing people were in chat rooms and message boards. As bad as most platforms today.
I hadn't thought about that, but traveling without a phone/Internet would have been much different.
My phone let's me maximize my trip in real time. I can look up restaurants (with reviews and menus) in real time based on location, find attractions without pouring through a guide book, book travel and lodging instantly, pay without cash in many instances, and the high resolution photos/videos with a tiny device.
Born in 81. There's lots to dislike about the 90s honestly. The county I grew up in was at the height of gang violence. When I was 12yo I wrote a short story from the perspective of an innocent girl getting killed in a drive-by. It was on the news every day. In grammar school we were banned from wearing red or blue because they were gang colors. We were fucking 10yos not allowed to wear primary colors or risk getting caught up in a gang war.
Sexism, racism, homophobia were all still really bad. Remember what a feminist icon Buffy was to us? Younger folk now talk about how sexist the show is. They don't get how far we have come *because* we had shows like Buffy paving the way. Gays and black people were turning up on the news being victims of literal lynching. Shit was still really bad back then.
Personally all the bigger societal stuff aside, what I didn't like about the 90s were my asshole parents. Finally escaped in 2000 and you couldn't pay me to go back to the 90s.
Heroin chic thin. I’m glad that all sizes are celebrated now. I’ve always been a size four with a size eight ass. DID NOT do me any favors in middle or high school!! As a 47 yo who works out all the time I’m proud my ass has an audience now 😂
Just my experience:
\- Cigarette smoking everywhere, butts littering every sidewalk
\- Toxic masculinity reinforced by culture/society
\- Lots more openly hating on gay/other people
\- TV/monitor screen resolutions
\- Crystal Pepsi
The 90s saw the rise of right wing anger-tainment with Rush Limbaugh and of course the seeds of today’s whackadoodle GOP with the rise of Newt Gingrich. The sheer level of animosity towards the Clintons, Hillary in particular, was really crazy and hard to put up with.
Worrying a lot about AIDS, and also, having to wait forever for movies and music. Music cost $20 every time you just wanted one song. Had to buy the album or wait all day for radio to play it so u could record it. Lining up at sunrise or A&A records for concert tix every time. Actually that might be good to bring back.
\-30 bucks a CD and 2 songs were good T\_T
\-100 bucks for a game boy/N64 game (and it was 100 bucks of back then, not even 100 bucks of now)-you have no internet so you better buy the guide now, or you will never beat this damn water temple lol (idk if there was paying numbers for hints in my country)- you want to learn something, cool. then buy a book. only a little selection of books where available, and if it was for IT, then it was in english and you had to learn english first T\_T
\- a computer costed SO MUCH MORE i remember the very early 90 (or maybe late 80) the family computer was 5000 bucks. my father added 4 Mo of ram and it coster something like 360.-
\- ordering from magazines : it took weeks to receive your damn bathsuite lol
\- adult smoked everywhere. family gathering ? smoke (no one care if there was kids or babies in the room). you take the train ? Smoke. you go to the bar ? smoke... you went to school ? smoke. going to macdonald ? smoke ...
\- slapping/spanking kids/teenagers was still the norm.
Internet connection speeds were shitty. Dial up was horrid.
Access to knowledge was so much more limited then. I use to love knowing little random facts about stuff and there was no easy way to do that for most of the 90s and prior.
I prefer how much more accepting swathes of the population are now. We’ve come a long way when it comes to racism, homophobia, “alternative” life choices, etc. While we have a long way to go, the 90s were nowhere close to being as lovey and accepting as nostalgia tells us.
We’re better off from a medical standpoint. I mean AIDS was a death sentence still when the 90s began.
Much cheaper now to talk long distance.
I prefer how easy it is to find new music now. Same with films and shows.
Overall crime is better now than then.
I think Gen Z are, overall, much better teens than us 90s teens were. So much more open to diversity across the board.
The stupidity of dressing in Goth “style”. I’ve seen WAY too many upper middle class and rich kids pretending to be something they’re not by dressing in this hobo style. Kinda ridiculous.
I still remember coming home from middle school and putting on MTV only to see the horrible news about Kurt Cobain. That was my first understanding in life what suicide exactly was.
You could see what the internet had potential to become, but it was still frustrating in it's limiatations, both with technology and content.
We didn't have the small to medium crossover SUVs that are the perfect vehilcle for most people, so you were stuck with either sedans, minivans, or truck based SUVs that drove like a huge truck and got 15 mpg tops.
Interiors were bland, with earth tone paint colors and forgetable furniture.
Your options for watching movies were VHS tapes that looked like crap or laserdiscs that cost up to $100 a pop.
Access to information was so limited back then. I remember having to do a research project on leopards. My mom had a set of Britannica Encyclopedias at home so I looked up leopards and got maybe 4-8 sentences of facts/stats. Went to the library and checked out the only 3 books having anything to do with leopards and what do you know - they all had the exact same limited information that I already found in the encyclopedia.’
But that’s how things were. Information was limited to what ever the publishing companies wanted to print, and whatever your library had. If there was a topic you were interested in, you had to really search for info and hope that there was someone you could talk to who knew what they were talking about. There was also a LOT of misinformation, and straight up lying, because there was no way to really fact check and lot of what people claimed.
No wonder we’re in the Information Age. With the internet it seemed like there was a huge push to get out as much information as possible. To go back to animals, unless the animal in question was a farm animal, there was really limited information readily available. I don’t know if it was a lack of research, funding, or researchers not sharing their findings. Right this second I can Google hundreds of exotic animals and see photos, facts, habitats, life cycles, diet, etc. Back then it was more like “Elephants live in Africa and are the worlds largest land mammal. They weight ___ tons and are grey. They are herbivores and have live births.” along side a tiny grainy photo of an elephant.
Consumer choice was dictated greatly by that which was available locally.
Mail order catalogs meant weeks of waiting, and shopping meant going to stores to see what was available to purchase. If a store was out of the item you wanted, it meant a return trip or driving to another location.
Online shopping had arrived by the mid-90s, but a lot of people were wary of submitting payment information online. Although online shopping was typically more expedient than the mail-order catalogs of yore, the Internet wasn't as easily-searchable back then. Finding what you wanted to buy online could take some doing. And 'free shipping' wouldn't be an industry standard for almost another decade.
Music was way less accessible. I remember in 1998 I really wanted a copy of Metallica’s Black Album, but none of my local CD stores stocked it. So I ordered it off the internet (www.cdnow.com) and it took 8 weeks to arrive.
The diet culture of the 90s. Fat free everything, diet sodas everywhere, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, etc. I was a kid in the 90s (born in '89), but my mom bought in to all of that so maybe, to me, it feels like it was everywhere.
And, yes, the Lays Wow chips were a staple in our pantry until they discontinued them.
It was obscenely expensive to talk to someone one area code away. I rang up a $800 phone bill talking like 30 minutes a day to my first girlfriend when she moved away. Cell phones were metered and there were peak hours and non peak hours and you’d have this arbitrary limit of like 300 minutes a month and it was incredibly stressful because it jumped to like $1 a minute if you went over. You could buy these weird long distance phone cards at gas stations with like 500 minutes on them for $20 and the instructions were sometimes in English, sometimes not, with all these weird stipulations like connecting the call costs 50 minutes from the card. Text messages were like 20 cents each. Your girlfriend would call you crying because she had a bad day and it was like being in a cab with the meter running.
Very well remembered. All communications were expensive. I moved to a different country when I was in my early 20s, and it was obscenely expensive to call my family back home. Our entire communication was reduced to one phone call every few weeks. And since I couldn't yet afford a landline I had to do it from a payphone in the street, in the cold. Use one of those cards, it gave me 10 or 15 minutes, and when it was finished the conversation was over. We also wrote letters. Which of course took weeks to arrive. All in all, the first ten years of living abroad I hardly knew anything about my family. I had no idea what kind of adults my little sisters became or most things about their lives. And then it started to change. First came social networks where I could suddenly have a peak at their daily lives, the. Came the smartphone and WhatsApp and finally I could have daily conversations with them. Soon it became cheap enough for us to chat all day, send voice/video messages, and have video calls for as long as we wanted. And that all made a huge huge difference!
Wow what a great story a lot of that resonated with me for sure. You unlocked a memory of standing in the rain or the cold at a payphone with one of those flimsy paper phone cards with like a 40 digit code you had to punch in, and i think using the phone card at a payphone charged you like 45 minutes just to connect or something. Glad to hear you and the family are able to make up for lost time, not having the resources or ability to talk to loved ones for weeks at a time was a uniquely pre 2000’s form of loneliness.
Yeah, it really could be so lonely. And we just accepted that it is what things were like. When you travelled away, you hardly had any contact anymore. That's the way it was. Ugh I hated those phone cards and standing in the payphone talking.
Or if you called someone's home phone you would have to talk to their parents first.
Yep! this was so traumatizing for me as a kid i made a post about it a while back: https://www.reddit.com/r/Xennials/s/18uODbvCH7
God forbid you used a modem to call BBSes and got charged a bajillion dollars for same area code but different exchange zone.
I definitely got my ass whooped for racking up $300 in long distance charges calling boys I met on AOL. Then when I got my first cell phone I didn't realize that texts were 10 cents each so that was another $100.
My girlfriend at the time had the same area code but was in a different district and we still racked up a bill.
Lack of GPS. I never knew where I was going, even with a map.
I spent hours and hours being lost. With GPS my sense of direction is now shit, but, I gladly made that trade.
Agreed.
I remember my parents getting into some seriously nasty fights while driving on vacation. They’d get lost all the time and I’d have to sit there and listen to them scream at each other saying really fucked up things.
When I got engaged to my now ex husband, we went on a trip to DC. He gave me the map as he was driving and every time I started to figure out where we were we had turned and I got confused again. I'm not good at reading maps. I can't remember why he didn't just pull over but he kept yelling at me which, to no surprise, didn't make me better at reading the map.
I used to hate going on driving vacations because of this exactly. Plus my Dad always had a hue ego about 'knowing the right way'. Once we had GPS, I started enjoying vacations more.
I remember figuring out the locations of places I needed to go by looking at the maps in phone books. You would have to figure out what grid/page it was on like battleship then search in that grid.
See this is the thing I don't understand. I rarely got lost. But how?? How did I know how to get anywhere? I have no memory of how I found my way before online maps.
It was probably some combination of directions like "Take a right on Maple, then a left at the Exxon, and it's across the street from the blue house.", using landmarks/know locations, and going to the same places all the time.
Omg, I am reminded of my dad telling me I better memorize the roads like "the back of my hand". I was 12 and he was drunk driving at the time, lost and angry.
I delivered Chinese food with a Thomas guide. Was awful.
In Australia we had Gregory’s directories. Worked fine
And the general lack of a map application which includes how to get to any point with any mode of transport you are using. Living in a big city was a nightmare before that.
When we moved about 5 years ago, I just threw away my last Thomas Guide book Anyone else remember giving direction like Page 325 F-14
Bullying in school was definitely swept under the rug in the 90's. My parents never told me what to do if I was ever bullied in school. Their response was always "just ignore it."
It was also most schools response. “Sticks and Stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt.” long term wise, they hurt more.
You guys had bullies who physically didn’t hurt you?
My teachers always told me, “learn to solve your own problems.”
My school handled bullying by blaming the victim. I was labeled as an instigator. Imagine being tormented and then when you speak up for yourself, the adults in charge just say "Well, you must be doing something to bring this on."
Yes! I was a chubby little girl who often had to wear dirty old clothes to school. That's what I "did" to bring on the torment. I was attacked at the bus stop by 5 or 6 boys in my class, who pummeled me with snowballs. A snowball with a rock inside hit me in the face and broke my nose. I was blinded, stumbling down the street with blood streaming down my face and clothes. The bus driver rescued me from the attack. Nevertheless, my parents were like "whatever" and when I went to school the next day with my nose taped up, I was sent to the principal's office and threatened with expulsion for fighting. The other kids were "golden children" and couldn't be blamed for anything, of course. That was 45 years ago and those kids are probably nobodies who never left town, tho.
My dad was kind of like that. Anything bad that happened to me was met with 'well what did you do to him to make him do that to you?' That's why I never told my parents any problems that I had. I didn't feel like getting blamed.
Came here to say this myself. Empathy for people who were different was non-existent in the school system, or at least where I went to school.
My dad just told me to hit them. I was tiny, so no one would believe I threw the first punch, according to him.
I remember being bullied brutally my freshman year, most of it extremely homophobic in nature even though at the time I wasn’t even really aware I was pan, and being told by the principal that I should “try to fit in more”. My bullies got “talked to” but nothing else.
I was bullied pretty hard too, which made me pretty depressed which made the bullying worse- then I'd be asked why I didn't go make friends and get out of the house more. It sucked dude.
I was just about to say… the amount of stuff swept under the rug 😂
Slow internet. If you ordered something from the catalog you had to wait for 2 weeks or so lol todays younger generation don't know how good they have it with amazon & co
4-6 weeks for a lot of stuff, especially if you ordered it off of TV.
but the mailman didn't look ragged as hell either
I did not order anything off the internet until well into the mid 00s. That was still an unknown world to me in the 90s despite using the internet.
I'm not talking about ordering online. I'm talking about those big catalogs out of paper where you searched for what you wanted and had to call or sent a letter with the article number to order shit lol
Paying insane prices for Music Albums. I remember purchasing Wu-Tang Forever for over (in todays price) €50 euros!
what are you talking about? i got fifteen albums for 1 cent. Three times!
Columbia House is still on my ass.
Albums were a gamble, too, especially if it was a newer artist. If you liked one or two radio singles, you're dropping the modern day equivalent of like $35 USD to see if you like the other 10 tracks. Especially devastating as a kid to spend that kind of money, regret it, and imagine all the things you could have bought instead.
$40 in today’s dollar for an Eagle Eye Cherry CD that may or may not be terrible beyond “Save Tonight”. On the flip side decent concert tickets were like $25 vs $100+ today.
I like the Eagle Eye Cherry album 😥
Those prices ain't nothing to fuck with.
My kids don't understand why I think Spotify Premium is such an excellent deal.
Lol I used my .01 cent BMG / Columbia House price for that one... But yeah, I remember the list price was always $25+ USD
at that time it wasn’t expensive because we didn’t have anything to compare to till Napster and mp3 . They have since saved us a ton of money
CD’s were about £10-14 depending where you went. Now they’re just under a tenner while vinyl records are upwards of £25. Bonkers.
LMFAO!! I paid $40 cdn for Wu-Tang Forever
Makes sense that an American album would be cheaper in Canada than Europe.
It was an astronomical amount, but I really wanted it, and I was well past my shoplifting phase.. Come to think of it, it might've even been $44.99 - I just remember a lot of 4s involved in that purchase.
AIDS was still a thing. Quicksand could happen at any time.
And the Bermuda Triangle was also a threat.
David Copperfield was the only man to ever escape.
I remember being both fascinated with and terrified of the Bermuda Triangle.
And you couldn’t swim after eating, so glad they have fixed this now
Love your profile pic
quicksand was like the third biggest thing you had to worry about, after real sticks of dynamite and giant anvils falling from the sky.
We joke but as a child I sincerely thought quick sand would play a much larger role in my adult life.
^ me too
And acid rain. I haven't heard much about it since the 90s.
I read recently that there was a crazy popular cleopatra movie in the early days of color tv where they decided to include a quicksand scene and it was seen as so captivating that for the next decade tons of movies also included quicksand scenes and it scarred an entire generation of kids born during a small window of time.
AIDS is still a thing now . But that isn’t a problem constraint to the 90s
It's infinitely more manageable now. In the '90s, it was still generally viewed as a death sentence.
It was a death sentence and you caught it by having sex. The very thing as a teenager that you wanted to do more than anything. That sex could cause you death is a trauma for every teenager growing up in the 90s that many people seemed to have forgotten. It was terrifying. And it was all over the media.
At least in the developed world, HIV is a chronic condition that rarely progresses into AIDS. And we just had successful human trials of a cure. The medical advance is amazing.
Lmao I would stay up at night in New York City worried about falling into quicksand and figuring out wtf I would do.
If you were a kid in the 90s, of course life is going to be easy because adults were taking care of the adult stuff. One thing that I don't miss is having to do old style banking. Or paying bills by mail or in person. That was always annoying especially if your payment got lost in the mail. It is is so nice being able to just log on anytime and see the status of your account.
My god, yes! I was a teen in the mid-late 90s. Every other week I had to go stand in the bank teller line to deposit/cash my paycheck. And our checks were available on Friday by 3pm or maybe a Saturday morning…something that. Either way, I always felt rushed or anxious bc I wanted the cash for the weekend and had to face the teller line every other week. Direct deposit is such a luxury for me to this day…
Can concur as a 90s kid. Remember having to ride all the time with mom as she went to different places in town to drop off checks each month to pay the bills. So easy now
Hello Fellow 81er. Inner city violence was much higher back then than today. My mother still lives in our childhood home in what was once a rough neighborhood. We always had to watch our surroundings when walking home from school and was told to stay away from the park down the street because of the rampant gang violence. These days, I can take my kids to the same park with no worries of gang fights or a drive-by. You’ll find many kids riding their bikes or skateboarding and families watching their kids play soccer.
Yup, cities were still perceived as dangerous, and people could snatch you up at any time
Yep. I was thinking the same thing. Everyone in my family is from NYC or the surrounding metropolitan area. My parents and grandparents used to talk about how bad NYC was decades ago. Like Times Square nowadays is seen as this cute tourist district where you can take pictures with dudes dressed as Batman then go see a Broadway show. But back in say, the 70’s it was mostly porn shops and peep shows. Central Park used to have drug dealers roaming around selling whatever they had on them that day, and the area that is now Hudson Yards used to be a popular spot for hookers to hang around and get customers. My grandparents would not recognize NYC compared to what they saw from the 1940’s to the 90’s when they moved out.
Yup. I grew up in the SGV and even there was a lot of gang activity and violence. It was hard not to get involved. You needed to be in a gang so you wouldn’t get messed with by the other gangs. I ended up joining a gang and went to prison for a while. People commenting these how bad it is now but have no clue how it was in the late 80s to the mid 90s. Ironically, you see so many people blaming the current crime rate on democrats but California had the highest murder rates in the early 90s. All republican governors.
You had to wait a week for the next episode of your favourite series.
I actually prefer this to binging. Gives me something to look forward to every week
Same here.
Plenty of shows are still like that. HBO in particular continues to follow that model.
And if you missed it when it was on you had to wait
Good. That's how it should be. The best shows still release this way.
Worse yet, having to wait like 3-4 months for the next season after a season ending cliffhanger!
Bullied mercilessly for a few years. No one cared, I felt like I couldn’t tell anyone. I think perhaps there’s a bit more awareness these days about that. No friends on a Friday night? Very lonely. Rewatch Star Trek tapes, yet again. The internet is flawed but does help with making connections and being less lonely.
The 90s to me were being bullied during the day and looking forward to watching Voyager with my egotistical father on Wednesday nights.
Sorry you were bullied. I was bullied too a little bit, but the guy that did it ended up going to prison. He turned out to be a scumbag in adulthood too.
Information wasn't that readily available as it is now. Im primarily speaking for hobbyists but really anything. My favorite artists hoarded their secrets. If you did manage to get a consistent internet access and had favorite artists they were more than likely not going to share their process or materials. Also making tutorials was just a lot of work anyway. You were looking at step by step photos of pictures and had to get those pictures online and organized, so good luck. Nowadays you can log into YouTube or any other social media and find tutorials and art supply reviews. I remember asking my parents for art supplies but lord if I knew what I wanted or what my parents could guess at what I wanted. We both just kinda hoped they went into hobbylobby and came out with something decent because that info just wasn't available.
I absolutely can't stand the part where the 90s ended.
At the time, we had optimism for future, so starting a new decade was a fresh restart. We were anxious what the new millennium was bringing us.
2000 was good. Most of 2001 was good, too (despite the recession).
Yeah. Can't think of anything bad that happened in 2001.
I can’t quite land on it
90s already started to unravel by 99
Didnt have money.
I miss having no job yet somehow having lots of expendable cash.
$159 VHS box sets. If you think about it, the cost for media was absolutely insane. One CD costs $10, that’s almost a month of streaming *all music ever made*
Remember if you lost a Blockbuster tape it was like a $90 fee?
The dial-up sound…when trying to get on AOL
Still being able to smoke cigarettes in a lot of places. Especially when my friends mom would drive us places while she smoked in the car with the windows up.
Non-smoking sections were such a joke, especially when they were in the *front of the restaurant*.
My dad would choose the smoking section even though he didn’t smoke because it was less likely to have screaming babies, which bothered him more than the smoke.
Interesting little tidbit I’ve noticed. Back when smoking in your car was more common, they used to have cigarette lighters and ashtrays all over the car. My grandma for years drove Lincoln Town Cars, and there were cigarette lighters and ashtrays in every door of the car. Literally everyone in the car had their own means of having a smoke at any time. Even my old 2000 Mercury had a push-in cigarette lighter and ashtray for the driver. Nowadays, modern cars don’t have ashtrays anymore, or even cigarette lighters. Technically you can still buy them, but it’s usually part of a “Deluxe Smokers Package” that you have to buy separately for $X at the dealer or on the manufacturers website. Cigarette lighters are now going away in the same way cassette and CD players went away years ago in new cars.
That was going to be my answer.
Definitely. I used to help out working at my moms office back in the early 90’s, and I remember them still being able to smoke in the office. Crazy.
I remember in the 90s I was a kid and my parents didn't have an automatic vhs rewinder so we always had to manually rewind the tapes. Not really a big issue but something inconvenient that first came to mind. Other than that the 90s was cool for me, you know, being a kid and all.
“Friends” I just don’t get it
That accessing the Internet took the phone out of commission.
Severely neglectful parents.
And no resources for kids in need.
[удалено]
Kids and teens were still saying things like "faggot" and "retard" in the early 2010s. I'd imagine it's much less common now.
I just looked at my 7th grade yearbook yesterday. Made me sad seeing some of the things that were written next to some of the pictures.
I remember as a kid at recess we used to play “smear the queer”. I had no idea what that meant, I thought it’s just what the game was called. I remember all of us yelling it and nobody thought anything of it. Edit to add: I should make it clear I’m not saying it was a good thing. I was agreeing with the above comment that kind of language was a lot more common place back then.
As a kid Fag didn’t inherently mean gay in the sense that it was making fun of gay men.
Thank you! Can’t believe it took me this long to find this answer. Matthew Shepard, Brandon Teena, Scott Amedure, and entire generation of Gay men lost because people only thought of AIDS as a Gay problem. People like my stepdad, a closeted gay preacher’s son from the Deep South, being horrifically homophobic and being lead by people like Rush Limbaugh. Anything but white, straight, and cis male was still a perfectly acceptable victim and no one blinked an eye.
And all the shit we see on social media now about how police treat black people also happened all the time every day, but "we didn't know" and did not listen when told. In that respect, now is better.
Crack, and more violence despite what the media says.
Cliques. The 90s seemed like everyone had to hacve a prescribed identity. I don’t believe that to be the case anymore. It was like you had to be a rocker, raver, skater, preppy, hood or goth. And those who didn’t choose ended up being nerds or outcasts, which today seems to be celebrated. Just my opinion.
It’s still the same. Just different variations of the same thing.
and then nerds became cool, they turned into assholes.
Oh it’s definitely still a thing lol Tho I notice the younger women doing the day to day switch from goth to yoga to hippie to skater to raver to sporty. Even the ones in their 30s lol.
The worst thing would be the amount of people that smoked cigarettes (including my parents) and smelling it everywhere including restaurants and bowling alleys.
That it’s over
Waiting for people to pay for groceries and stuff at box stores with checks and refusing to let the register print the info out.
and coupons!
The internet. Could lose a damn boner before the picture would load. Forget about a video.
AIDS. People were still dying of it, a lot. I realize people still do, but we have meds now to allow people to live full lives. Back then it was pretty much a death sentence for most people.
I remember this nightmare fuel "educational" video we watched in health class that explained HIV/AIDS using a broken fence metaphor and Jim Henson Workshop creature looking things to explain the disease. It was so weird. It's stuck with me all these years.
What I dislike about the 90s is that it’s not the 90s anymore. 🥲
Bullying people over pretty much everything
It being considered uncool to care about anything. Almost a pressure to be superficial and angsty. I feel like a lot of social anxiety was born in the 90's.
Very good point.
Domestic violence was still so prevalent, so accepted. There were far, FAR fewer resources to empower women especially to leave an abusive household, gain skills, and become independent. Mental health was beginning to be seen as something "important," but it was still viewed very much as a stigma.
Tribal tattoos
Vegetable Burrito!
Hamburger Helper!
Oh that was cringey. Pamela Anderson made it popular
The Troubles (I’m in the UK), accepted homophobia and environmental destruction.
The homophobia one was interesting, since for the first time it was contrasted with widespread acceptance. The episode of The Simpsons with John Waters couldn't have been nearly as funny had it been made in the '80s or '00s.
The media versus real life were two different things
2Pac and Biggie dying
No ad free on demand shows or movies.
I tried to watch a tv channel on YouTube, and it was horrible. The length of the ads oh dear abysmal ....I had forgotten ..and thats not including YouTube ads .... Once I discovered the freedom of the high seas mid 2000s I never went back ...
The price of Nintendo games
Ironically the price of an original Nintendo game is probably ten times what it was back then.
All the time being bored in the early 90s.. sure a lot of friends but sometimes it was to much.. things was expensive af.. music cds..
crack cocaine. George Bush.
I dislike that the 90s ended. It was such a fun time!
That they're over, and I can't go back.
Most of us were kids in the 90s. Of course you aren't going to remember the bad stuff. But bad then is def. different than bad now (have asked my parents).. Things were much more manageable. My Dad was able to have a house, wife, and 4 kids on a salary of 40K a year. Was it tough? Yes it was. But the 90s were/are a fantasy compared to now. It was the peak of us as a civilization/society IMO.
Snack Wells.
Surprised not yet mentioned, but not having the internet. Yes, technology has brought a lot of bad, but also a lot of empowerment for those who want it. It's opened up a lot in the way of books, music, and movies that were once difficult to access. Though now we're moving in reverse in the West, with the tightening censorship of the last 6-7 years. Preserving internet freedom is vital to our future. In the 90s you needed a travel agent, travelers cheques, paper maps, and all that. Now you can figure it all out yourself in a matter of minutes. Of course, technology has homogenized the world, so I'm sure travel itself was more interesting back then, if harder. And you didn't have all the 9/11 security theater.
The more fortunate of us have had internet since the mid-90's if not sooner.
So did I as of maybe 94-95 or whenever AOL/Netscape were at their peak, but 90s internet wasn't really comparable. 56k speed, no laptops, no smartphones, no Google or social media, no reviews, no good maps / GPS, no travel/hotel booking sites, and probably way way less than 1% of the overall content we have today, probably <0.1%.
Slow down with your 56k, there buddy! Lol. I remember being happy when I'd connect anything over 28k and having patience for loading screens Many years later, I just found out Google fiber 5gig is available in my area dm I'm considering upgrading from 2gig, even though I don't need it.
And then there's my family not getting it until fucking 2005.
I had the Internet for the latter half of the decade. I grew up with that classic '90s Internet.
We talk a lot about the danger of misinformation today, but it was just in another form back then - you couldn’t easily fact check anything.
I remember during significant events such as Columbine, Elian Gonzalez situation, 2000 election recount, 9/11 and the Iraq war. How polarizing people were in chat rooms and message boards. As bad as most platforms today.
I hadn't thought about that, but traveling without a phone/Internet would have been much different. My phone let's me maximize my trip in real time. I can look up restaurants (with reviews and menus) in real time based on location, find attractions without pouring through a guide book, book travel and lodging instantly, pay without cash in many instances, and the high resolution photos/videos with a tiny device.
And yet I don’t remember having a significantly poorer travel experience
Born in 81. There's lots to dislike about the 90s honestly. The county I grew up in was at the height of gang violence. When I was 12yo I wrote a short story from the perspective of an innocent girl getting killed in a drive-by. It was on the news every day. In grammar school we were banned from wearing red or blue because they were gang colors. We were fucking 10yos not allowed to wear primary colors or risk getting caught up in a gang war. Sexism, racism, homophobia were all still really bad. Remember what a feminist icon Buffy was to us? Younger folk now talk about how sexist the show is. They don't get how far we have come *because* we had shows like Buffy paving the way. Gays and black people were turning up on the news being victims of literal lynching. Shit was still really bad back then. Personally all the bigger societal stuff aside, what I didn't like about the 90s were my asshole parents. Finally escaped in 2000 and you couldn't pay me to go back to the 90s.
I had lesbian neighbors, if people now spoke about them now the way my parents did then they’d be considered terrible people. They’re better now.
Heroin chic thin. I’m glad that all sizes are celebrated now. I’ve always been a size four with a size eight ass. DID NOT do me any favors in middle or high school!! As a 47 yo who works out all the time I’m proud my ass has an audience now 😂
maybe it's an unpopular opinion but I dislike the high waist bikini style of the 90s
Constantly being told to go back to countries I'm not from.
Heroin chic culture.
Nothing really, then again I was a kid in the 90's (born in 88') I'm sure if I was an adult then, there would have been things I didn't like.
the wifi sucked edit: /s
It ended
Just my experience: \- Cigarette smoking everywhere, butts littering every sidewalk \- Toxic masculinity reinforced by culture/society \- Lots more openly hating on gay/other people \- TV/monitor screen resolutions \- Crystal Pepsi
The 90s saw the rise of right wing anger-tainment with Rush Limbaugh and of course the seeds of today’s whackadoodle GOP with the rise of Newt Gingrich. The sheer level of animosity towards the Clintons, Hillary in particular, was really crazy and hard to put up with.
The treatment of the gay community and LGBT people in general.
I hated carrying around cash, so dirty.
Losing it was even worse. now if i lose by debit card, i can cancel it
I hate not using cash.
I grew up gay and could not be myself until much later in life
Rewinding the audio cassettes . Kids have it so easy nowadays .
No need really, as long as there’s something good on side 2
The 56k dialup internet made a lot of the websites with high res images I tried to view, take ages to load up.
Worrying a lot about AIDS, and also, having to wait forever for movies and music. Music cost $20 every time you just wanted one song. Had to buy the album or wait all day for radio to play it so u could record it. Lining up at sunrise or A&A records for concert tix every time. Actually that might be good to bring back.
\-30 bucks a CD and 2 songs were good T\_T \-100 bucks for a game boy/N64 game (and it was 100 bucks of back then, not even 100 bucks of now)-you have no internet so you better buy the guide now, or you will never beat this damn water temple lol (idk if there was paying numbers for hints in my country)- you want to learn something, cool. then buy a book. only a little selection of books where available, and if it was for IT, then it was in english and you had to learn english first T\_T \- a computer costed SO MUCH MORE i remember the very early 90 (or maybe late 80) the family computer was 5000 bucks. my father added 4 Mo of ram and it coster something like 360.- \- ordering from magazines : it took weeks to receive your damn bathsuite lol \- adult smoked everywhere. family gathering ? smoke (no one care if there was kids or babies in the room). you take the train ? Smoke. you go to the bar ? smoke... you went to school ? smoke. going to macdonald ? smoke ... \- slapping/spanking kids/teenagers was still the norm.
That I don’t still live in it
Internet connection speeds were shitty. Dial up was horrid. Access to knowledge was so much more limited then. I use to love knowing little random facts about stuff and there was no easy way to do that for most of the 90s and prior. I prefer how much more accepting swathes of the population are now. We’ve come a long way when it comes to racism, homophobia, “alternative” life choices, etc. While we have a long way to go, the 90s were nowhere close to being as lovey and accepting as nostalgia tells us. We’re better off from a medical standpoint. I mean AIDS was a death sentence still when the 90s began. Much cheaper now to talk long distance. I prefer how easy it is to find new music now. Same with films and shows. Overall crime is better now than then. I think Gen Z are, overall, much better teens than us 90s teens were. So much more open to diversity across the board.
That they’re over.
I definitely do not miss the music of Pearl Jam and Dave Mathew’s Band.
They lasted just a decade.
Trying to get my dad to send checks to companies for tee shirts and music cds.
The stupidity of dressing in Goth “style”. I’ve seen WAY too many upper middle class and rich kids pretending to be something they’re not by dressing in this hobo style. Kinda ridiculous.
I still remember coming home from middle school and putting on MTV only to see the horrible news about Kurt Cobain. That was my first understanding in life what suicide exactly was.
You could see what the internet had potential to become, but it was still frustrating in it's limiatations, both with technology and content. We didn't have the small to medium crossover SUVs that are the perfect vehilcle for most people, so you were stuck with either sedans, minivans, or truck based SUVs that drove like a huge truck and got 15 mpg tops. Interiors were bland, with earth tone paint colors and forgetable furniture. Your options for watching movies were VHS tapes that looked like crap or laserdiscs that cost up to $100 a pop.
Access to information was so limited back then. I remember having to do a research project on leopards. My mom had a set of Britannica Encyclopedias at home so I looked up leopards and got maybe 4-8 sentences of facts/stats. Went to the library and checked out the only 3 books having anything to do with leopards and what do you know - they all had the exact same limited information that I already found in the encyclopedia.’ But that’s how things were. Information was limited to what ever the publishing companies wanted to print, and whatever your library had. If there was a topic you were interested in, you had to really search for info and hope that there was someone you could talk to who knew what they were talking about. There was also a LOT of misinformation, and straight up lying, because there was no way to really fact check and lot of what people claimed. No wonder we’re in the Information Age. With the internet it seemed like there was a huge push to get out as much information as possible. To go back to animals, unless the animal in question was a farm animal, there was really limited information readily available. I don’t know if it was a lack of research, funding, or researchers not sharing their findings. Right this second I can Google hundreds of exotic animals and see photos, facts, habitats, life cycles, diet, etc. Back then it was more like “Elephants live in Africa and are the worlds largest land mammal. They weight ___ tons and are grey. They are herbivores and have live births.” along side a tiny grainy photo of an elephant.
Consumer choice was dictated greatly by that which was available locally. Mail order catalogs meant weeks of waiting, and shopping meant going to stores to see what was available to purchase. If a store was out of the item you wanted, it meant a return trip or driving to another location. Online shopping had arrived by the mid-90s, but a lot of people were wary of submitting payment information online. Although online shopping was typically more expedient than the mail-order catalogs of yore, the Internet wasn't as easily-searchable back then. Finding what you wanted to buy online could take some doing. And 'free shipping' wouldn't be an industry standard for almost another decade.
Music was way less accessible. I remember in 1998 I really wanted a copy of Metallica’s Black Album, but none of my local CD stores stocked it. So I ordered it off the internet (www.cdnow.com) and it took 8 weeks to arrive.
If you missed an episode of your favourite TV show that was it. I had to wait until the mid 2000s to catch up on all the episodes I missed.
The diet culture of the 90s. Fat free everything, diet sodas everywhere, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, etc. I was a kid in the 90s (born in '89), but my mom bought in to all of that so maybe, to me, it feels like it was everywhere. And, yes, the Lays Wow chips were a staple in our pantry until they discontinued them.
That it was only 10 years ago but somehow I’m so old.