Experiences Out Of Stock

What are customer experiences you remember that aren't there anymore?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about things that used to be common and are not around anymore, or aren’t made anymore. Of course, that’s one of the themes I focus on with regard to old cities and traditional urbanism. But I also think about this a lot with consumer products and experiences: the way the texture of everyday life subtly changes until something is just quietly, uneventfully gone.

The other area where I’ve thought about this is restaurants, and how restaurant “concepts” come and go, embedded in economic periods, immigration trends, food fads, and other things. One of the most curious things to me is coming across a restaurant or store that is no longer started anew, but which has survived long enough to feel antique or old-fashioned.

Think about a Pizza Hut or an old-school Chinese buffet (the ones with those faux-brick floor tiles, where a little bit of basic sushi is served on a tray instead of a full sushi bar area, where the hibachi is still called “Mongolian grill” and is maybe even a circular cooktop.) Places from the 1980s or 1990s that were never renovated and never really changed what they had always done. or an old-school sandwich shop or independent pizzeria with those chipped orange Formica booths.

Another thing I remember is calling pizzerias or Chinese takeouts on the phone, or just showing up, ordering in person, and walking around the shopping center or up and down town until it was ready. There was a slowness to that that was really nice, compared to using an app or an online ordering system. You got to know the people working there. You might chat with another customer waiting in line.

I know you can still call or show up, but it feels kind of like you’re bothering people when there’s a seamless, frictionless alternative. Getting to be unselfconsciously human feels like a treat instead of the default, which changes it even when you do it.

I’m thinking of another vanished consumer experience today: office-chair shopping. I remember as a kid, going to Staples when my dad got a new office chair a couple of times. I would play with the chairs in that big office furniture showroom area in the back of the store. I remember the really expensive leather executive chairs and the heavy, fancy desks with lots of drawers. I’d pull one up to a desk and pretend to be a CEO or something. It felt like a theme park to me, all this furniture you could just try out and play with laid out there, with nobody really watching you.

At one time, I suppose, this was a novel idea: the self-serve retail concept applied to everything. Today, even though the reduced number of office supply stores out there still have furniture sections, it feels distinctly old-fashioned. The next time I buy an office chair—my last one was from Staples and is still great (and my large cat loves it)—it might just be from Amazon.

It’s funny how that mode of self-serve big-box retail must have felt very impersonal, stripped of the relationship between customer and proprietor. Yet still, it was so much more grounded in the real world than e-commerce. This is what I mean by time changing what a thing is.

Can you think of any consumer experiences that are just rarer than they used to be, or special in a way they weren’t when you were younger? Another one that comes to mind is getting my feet measured at shoe stores; even the big-box shoe stores did that when I was a kid.