re: Name something you pay for as an adult that your parents would never have

cable or streaming tv

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Name brand food.

As a kid, if there was a house brand, that's what we got.

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This brings back a lot of memories. My dad would often combine the steak sauces into one bottle when it was getting low. I swear we had just the one big glass bottle of imitation A1 sauce for my whole childhood that was just filled with different steak sauces that were on sale that month.

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Vacation somewhere out of state

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My Dad was an electrician so getting laid off was a common occurrence for him. When a layoff coincided with summer vacation they would take his last 2 paychecks, skip out on rent wherever we were living, move all of our shite into my grandparents barn and we would take off to Florida until school started back....on 2 weeks pay LOL. Sometimes it would happen in May and we would stay until mid - late august. Either Daytona or Panama City Beach. Would get a beach front efficiency with a pool in Daytona and the same at PCB or a couple of times we stayed in town on the bay in Panama City (not Panama City Beach LOL). I do not know how they did it but we somehow stayed on vacation most summers 4-6 weeks on 2 weeks wages for an electrician in the 1970s. These weren't palatial motels....but they were fine for us. We ate sandwiches for lunch and dinner and cereal for breakfast and stayed in the pool or on the beach from daylight to dark. We may or may not eat out at a seafood place once during this time. My dad and I would go fishing a couple of times during these vacations but other than that it was all day in the pool or on the beach. We did not know what sunblock was so we would have second degree burns over most of our bodies within hours of the first morning but by about day 3 we would be dark as coal and impervious to the effects of the sun (how all of us do not have skin cancer is a miracle). It was a BLAST....my kids wouldn't stand for it for a minute LOL....if they had to eat peanut butter sandwiches for dinner on vacation they would call the authorities on us for child abuse....but my 2 sisters and I thought it was perfectly normal and considering most of our friends never left town during the summer we were the envy of everyone we knew.

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The reason for the car care comments is because cars back then were built to be easily serviced by anyone with even a slight mechanical inclination.

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They were also worn completely out by the time they reached 100K miles....the odometers rolled over because the manufacturers knew they were unlikely to last more than about 100K miles. There wasn't much use in doing a lot of maintenance, they would be falling apart before they were what most of us would call broke in today....

Internet

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Bottled Water

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It’s crazy to me how much more commonplace this is when there was such a big push to reduce bottle usage years ago but we only seem to be using more and more.

Name brand peanut butter.

Door Dash

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They were also worn completely out by the time they reached 100K miles....the odometers rolled over because the manufacturers knew they were unlikely to last more than about 100K miles. There wasn't much use in doing a lot of maintenance, they would be falling apart before they were what most of us would call broke in today....

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Conversely, people didn't put nearly as many miles in a given period of time on their cars as they do today. Commuting an hour 1-way to a job was very rare.