When was the last time you used the Yellow Pages to do something other than kill a bug, prop a coffee mug or start a fire? Exactly. Nobody wants to flip through a thousand pages to find a company, when they can type a few words online, and find exactly what they need with reviews from other customers.
The Swiffer does both, without building up dust piles in the corners of your house, and it sends out a great fragrance while it’s at it.
Everyone’s about the Keurig today and similar machines that let you buy flavor variety pack, single serving coffees. And now that Keurig is coming out with a machine that can make several cups at once, it has the social element of home-brewed coffee covered too.
The days of teenage boys calling a girl’s house, nervously, hoping she answers but running the risk of getting her dad…are over. Everybody has cellphones now. If somebody wants a personal phone and a business one, they just get two cell phones.
When the landline goes naturally so will the answering machine. And thank goodness because we’ve all experienced the anxiety of wondering if ten strangers are listening to our voice blaring out on that thing.
These will probably stick around for a while, but with most people catching onto the dangers of tap water and filtering their drinking water through Brita’s, the little automated waterspout on your fridge might go away.
If somebody wants to give you information, they can just text it or email it to you. And why would you ever need to ask someone for an address? You can just find it online. You’ve probably already noticed that the few times you reach for a pen and paper to write something down, you can’t find one. Because you don’t add those items to you grocery list anymore…
Admit it: it’s getting harder and harder to buy incandescent lights when you go to the store and your old bulbs are surrounded by ones slapped with titles like “LED” and “made from recycled materials.”
This isn’t an item so much as a part of the actual house, but we can see the mail slot built into the front door disappearing. It’s an unnecessary security hazard.
With the desperate condition of bees (over 50% of bee colonies have been destroyed in recent years) it’s hard, in good conscience, to buy real honey from bees over all the plant alternatives like agave syrup.
Source: Targethealth.com
Similar to the issue with the Yellow Pages, a quick click on the Internet can tell someone when a show airs. But also, many people no longer watch shows in real time and instead catch up when they can online.
There are ongoing debates on whether liquid soap is more sanitary than bar soap, but no matter what science says: why would you buy a bar that slips and slides everywhere and leaves residue on your sink when you could buy wonderfully scented, easy to use liquid soap?
Think about the main things you use stamps for: sending checks, sending in a payment for a parking ticket, sending contracts…but almost everything that used to require physical signatures can now be signed digitally. And as for packages, we take those to the post office anyways because they require so many stamps, we’d rather just pay the postage directly.
We wish people still had time to play a board game! But life keeps getting busier and busier, and if people do have the free time a board game would require, it’s so rare they’d rather spend it talking or catching up on shows. If we do crave a good game, we can pull one up, all set up, on our phones and computers in two seconds.
Fax machines will go away for the same reasons stamps do: things like digital signatures exist now. At the very least, you can print something out, sign it, scan it, and email it.
