You kids today have it made...

Although I'm younger than some of you, and I can still remember when I was a little boy at the TV only had 4 channels and no remote, no VCR. The channels were: BBC1, BBC2, ITV1 (it had a different name back then) and Channel 4.

King Arthur said:

I would argue that laziness is the prime motivating factor in all inventions, innovations, and technological breakthroughs throughout history. :P

You can't argue with that...anything to save time or a buck.

Here in the Los Angeles area growing up in the late fifties and sixties we had:

1) An Egg Man .....coo coo ca choo !
2) A Milk Man
3) The Helms Bakery Man (the best smells ever when the donut draw was opened!)
4) All the local Markets and Liquor stores delivered
5) A Paper Boy or Boy's

Oddly I can't remember Pizza deliveries back then.....wonder when that actually began (PizzaMan or the like)

I remember all except all the stores delivering.

I wish I had bought a Helm's truck when they came on the market.

Yep, all of that but some of the delivery folks expected a dime tip.

Replying to:
Anyone remember the milk man? And the ice man? And the paper boys hawking the headlines? And the Western Union delivery guy who almost always had very bad news!

Imperfect1 said:

My mom used to send me out to the corner drugstore to buy her cigarettes. (That was allowed, in those days.) The cost of a pack of cigarettes was 20 cents. Several years later, as a teenager, when I became a smoker, cigarettes were 25 cents a pack. By the time I quit smoking in the early 1980s they cost around 75 cents a pack. What are they now? About $4 - $5 a pack? Or thereabouts?

Here in Ojai we used to buy a carton of cigarettes for $6 US.

Now a pack is selling for close to that.

I stopped in 1989.

My immediate reaction was that kids are soft now but I have a 15 year son and on reflection I think kids now have different pressures than some of us adults did. In my country there is more expectation by many parents that their kids do well enough at school to go to University even when a good trade may be their passion. I think there is more peer pressure on them now with social media sometimes resulting in psychological bullying. The sad consequences are fact. I believe it is a more dangerous world and kids tend to be more protected from the "dangerous" physical environment. When I was a young teen I'd jump on my bike and just head off.
I think cut them a bit of slack.