We were curious about which professions have become outdated over the years.
Proofreader
“Judging by the advertising I see online these days, proofreader.”
“Proofreading and editing are very much reduced professions.”
Paperboys
“Having a paper route used to be a thing, now there [are] very few people who get a daily physical paper. The route must cover a lot of miles now.”
“There was also a shift in the 90’s that it went from kids on bikes to adults in cars.”
Video Rental Stores
“I remember when most grocery stores had a video rental section too. Albertsons had the best selection of B-horror movies.”
“This is so sad, too. I used to do the Blockbuster mail rentals and for a time, you could exchange them in-store for other movies (and it would flag yours as returned).”
Photo Booth Operator
“Back in the 20th century, there used to be small huts in parking lots where a person would develop your film in as soon as 1 hour.”
Radio Disc Jockeys
“They’re not gone yet, but they are dwindling toward extinction. Local disc jockeys are fewer and fewer as radio stations consolidate under corporations.”
Secretaries
“When I started my career, even low-level managers had a person to write memos, answer their phone, and plan their travel. I worked in a company of 3,000 people, and I bet there were 100 of them. Now I’m guessing there are two.”
Pricing Gunner
“The entire industry of pricing guns. Everything in the store had a small white sticker with the price on it. The UPC code and scanner eliminated this and probably half of the jobs that stock shelves.”
Small Engine Repair
“Sure, there are still some people out there doing this, but small engines used to fail constantly, and everyone had a few of them. Reliability of the devices has reduced the number of people doing this.”
Cobbler
“There used to be people that fixed shoes and shined shoes. Every town had one. Every man had his shoes shined often.”
Manual Processor
“Factories used to be full of people doing ordinary things, like flipping over a different piece of metal every 8 seconds or pulling green apples off of the conveyor belt. Now that robotic systems are easy to program and cheap to buy, those jobs don’t exist.”
TV Repair
“I’d throw TV repairman-type stores on that list as well. Now everyone throws them out when they break. Those dudes would also service VCRs, which seemed to break constantly.”
Offset Printer
“My dad was a typesetter then [a] lino press operator. The expansion of simple pc printers killed many jobs in the business printing industry.”
Camera Sales
“I was just thinking about the old commercials for a local camera shop when I saw the name of the shop pop up in a much different context. And then I was like, ‘Oh yeah, there aren’t really any camera shops anymore’.”
Repairmen
“When I was a kid and something broke, you would just take it to the local repairman and he would fix it. Stereo, TV, vacuum, lawnmower, bike…These guys could fix anything. They had a small shop where they had parts for everything, in some sort of comforting chaos.”
Typesetter
“The guy who would physically lay out all the fonts and arrange how a newspaper or magazine page would be printed.”
Switchboard Operator
“An aunt was an AT&T operator. When they were broken up, she received some ‘throw away’ stocks in the new company NYNEX, which she kept. It’s now Verizon.”
Door-to-Door Salesmen
“You used to see them pretty frequently back in the 60s. Never see them now.”
“I remember vacuum salesmen still showing up and doing a 30 min demo in the late 80s. Now you just go to Walmart and get a vacuum for $100. Things have gotten so cheap.”
Medical Transcription
“Trained editors in medical language have resorted to spot-checking dictation done by Dragon. Once an important profession, now replaced by technology.”
Bike Messengers
“I don’t know if that’s really a ‘profession,’ but there used to be hundreds of them in SF and NYC (and other cities) racing around to deliver envelopes, advertising art, court filings, etc.
Now everything can be done with high-speed internet.”
Film Projectionists
“Sadly, film projectionists are way way down due to the conversion to digital instead of film in theaters.”
“I worked in a movie theater when that job was phased out.”
Full-Service Gas Attendants
“The kind who would pump your gas and do your windows. They were still around when I first started driving (30 years ago), but I can’t recall the last time I saw a full-service gas station.”
STUCK IN THE 60S: 10 THINGS BABY BOOMERS REFUSE TO LET GO OF
Memories of the “good old days” keep us trapped in the past. Baby boomers love to retell tales of how it was “in my day.” At the same time, millennials will tell them to get with the times. Being stuck in a time warp from which they don’t want to snap out of, here are things that baby boomers still think are fantastic.
STUCK IN THE 60S: 10 THINGS BABY BOOMERS REFUSE TO LET GO OF
16 ANNOYING PHRASES THAT MAKE PEOPLE IMMEDIATELY HATE YOU!
We wanted to know the most irksome things someone can say that turn you off! These online forum users didn’t hold back!
16 ANNOYING PHRASES THAT MAKE PEOPLE IMMEDIATELY HATE YOU!
OBSOLETE MILLENNIALS: 14 SKILLS THEY LEARNED IN THE 90S THAT HAVE NO PLACE IN TODAY’S WORLD
A lot has changed since the turn of the century – just ask this nostalgic lot!
OBSOLETE MILLENNIALS: 14 SKILLS THEY LEARNED IN THE 90S THAT HAVE NO PLACE IN TODAY’S WORLD
THE FALL FROM GRACE: 12 PROFESSIONS THAT WERE ONCE REVERED, NOW A TOTAL JOKE
These 12 professions that are now obsolete show how much the times have changed.
THE FALL FROM GRACE: 12 PROFESSIONS THAT WERE ONCE REVERED, NOW A TOTAL JOKE
FROM ‘OKAY BOOMER’ TO ‘UGH BOOMER’: 10 HABITS THAT IRRITATE MILLENNIALS
Each generation has its quirks. Most label it as an “old person thing” when asked why grandpa or grandma does something unusual. The defense from the other side is that “it was the way things were back in our day.”
FROM ‘OKAY BOOMER’ TO ‘UGH BOOMER’: 10 HABITS THAT IRRITATE MILLENNIALS