Think back to the back-to-school shopping of your youth. What supplies filled you with giddy anticipation and made you think that anything was possible?
@jouest What are these Trapper Keepers of which you speak? In my day, we got 3-ring binders covered in woven blue fabric and 2-pocket folders. If we were feeling really fancy, we’d get the ones that had a little insert to hold papers that you didn’t want to put in the binder.
@jouest@lisagd Honestly when I saw the question there was only one answer first in mind and that was it. I think there was a nostalgia reboot of it around 2005 might have one still. No idea why it went so viral but definitely did. It’s almost like the most basic marketing of something that’s useful and well designed, and people start talking about it, and then their friends get it, and then you want one, and make your parents drive you all around town to see if any store still has them. We are talking about the silly Stanley 40oz drink cups, right?
EDIT my original would have been in 1970’s some time. And it might still be in a box somewhere.
@narfcake i used to work at Hardee’s and my friend got me a job at Kmart in the footwear department. wasn’t a better job, but it beat the hell out of coming home smelling like fry grease.
that said, kmart footwear shoppers were straight up monsters. they’d just drop the shoes and box on the ground after trying them on. not even the slightest effort to put them back on the shelf.
one shift, i was straightening up the kids shoes and a woman’s high heel hits the ground next to me. just one. i assume someone is messing with me and just go back to straightening. about a minute later, another one hits. i get up, go one aisle over to the women’s shoes, and there’s this lady frantically trying on different heels. she takes a box out, pulls out one, drops the box on the ground, tries on the aforementioned heel, and if it doesn’t fit, she throws it into the next aisle over (where i had been).
i watched her do this another time. she still hasn’t seen me, so i walk back over to the aisle i was in and start throwing the shoes back. one of them hits its mark and i hear a “WHAT THE HELL?!” from her. she storms over and says, “did you just throw a shoe at me??”. i just calmly said “i thought we were playing a game”. she runs off to tell a manager and then leaves the store. manager (good guy named Jim) comes over and asks what happened. i told him the story and he asks why i didn’t just ask her to stop throwing the shoes over the aisle. i said, “if you really have to explain to someone to not throw shoes, ya think they’ll actually listen?”
it would have been a great job except for the customers. that, and the girls working in layaway and women’s clothes were incredibly cute.
@carl669 Every morning, the Target store in one of the most affluent parts of town starts the day with everything in the women’s clothing area neatly in place, a task which has consumed several hours of employee time during the prior evening and that morning. By 1PM, the floor is littered with things that have been pulled out, often carried to another part of the department, and dropped. Clerks try to make sweeps to pick up and rehang/refold/reshelve the items, but the asshole customers are always ahead of them.
At the second-busiest store in town, in a less affluent neighborhood, this problem is almost unknown.
@carl669@narfcake
I loved Kmart and shopped there till they closed, they had some really good deals. Im sure I could still find something around my house brand new with tags on it from Kmart (socks or slipper socks). I got a pair of boots there right before they closed that go just above the knee, they’re my favorite pair of boots (I still have them too). I’ve been looking for years to find another pair like them but I can never find them.
@phendrick Whatever brain cells I had that would have known the answer to that quiz have left the building. I checked Google and the answer didn’t ring a bell for any of the remaining brain cells. They are content using a calculator now.
@heartny@phendrick That’s funny I had a math teacher that taught us slide rules and that was cool but already was able to buy a Litronix calculator with LED display and a mini Casio that also was a watch/alarm/stopwatch.
Also high school electronics teacher made us learn tubes first, then those newfangled transistor things. But turns out basic tubes are not that different from FETs which make up a large part of our electronic stuff today. (TL;DR coming so I will stop).
Also about the slide rules I was lucky we had the only computer lab in the district, 1970s. And we could use BASIC or FORTRAN, so definitely slide rules not needed annymore. Unfortunately was way too early for geeks to be cool so none of that scored me any points with the girls.
OMG I had to learn FORTRAN 4 when I took college calculus. I had enough trouble with calculus because I had to also teach myself trig at the time (didn’t take it or pre calc in high school) let alone telling a fucking computer how to solve calculus problems.
And yeah BASIC… On an Apple 2e on campus I learned just enough to create a menu program where I could enter in which meals, how many people i was taking camping, and have a grocery list spit out.
I took Pascal because I thought it would be fun to know how to make card games. I then realized once I had figured out how to “solve” the problem I had no interest in writing the actual code, remove the typos, etc, to make it run. Wanted to delegate that.
When I designed a grad stats class last year I had to learn R (open source, free, can be used for stats program). SAS has some programming in it but not as much as R. I like menus!!! I am NOT a programer. I am a user. Who knew what I’d be forced to do against my will.
@heartny@Kid9sandliz@pmarin I taught Stat, but programming for it wasn’t in our syllabus back then, so never learned R / SAS, but have used / taught all your others plus a bunch of others (COBOL, PL/I, APL, PERL, LISP, ALGOL, various assemblies, …, i.e. anything old). Could have tutored you & shown you lots of tricks in the math, especially trig.
Well, K-mart didn’t exist yet, I did get a fancy slide ruler. Calculators cost thousands. But the schools still provided all the supplies
And i have decided your job is random weird topics.
For my offspring it was notebooks, spiral, and pocket with fantasy images, not girly fantasy but the works of … damn i can’t remember, started with an S, but you would see like tiger cubs in space. She is late Gen X, graduated high school in 1996
I’m a first year mother jones boomer, if you want to make that split, or mid boomer, the only girl in my advanced senior math class in high school and one of two in my high school physics class (taught by a woman, who looking back was probably a lesbian)
The only back-to-school shopping that I can specifically recall was for the uniform shorts for Phys Ed in junior high. That was also the class in which I was reliably terrorized in the locker room, an activity which the PE teacher chose to ignore. Eventually, my parents found a way to get me a medical excuse so that I didn’t have to take it anymore. There were other factors involved that I could discuss, but mostly from a lack of knowledge rather than certainty about things that I have to guess. It was the 1960s. There were a lot of things that people understood differently in those days. That statement is hiding a multitude of things behind it.
@Cerridwyn@werehatrack wow sorry to hear but that brings back memories for me too, but 1970s. I won’t go through the litany of abuses that would probably get people arrested or at least fired now. But hey it was the 70s. Had asthma at the time and that got me out but required meetings at the district superintendent, not just the principal. And then I was super-outcast because I got out of PE. Honestly would have benefitted from swimming, yoga, aerobics, stretching. But it was the 70s so basically football, baseball, and running.
@jouest@speediedelivery yeah that is kind of funny about Kmart. I’m still remembering the last few times I was in one and my thoughts are “so really you guys are still in business?” “Does anybody ever clean this place?” “How many dead bodies do you usually expect in the parking lot each morning?”
@phendrick I used to like to spread a bunch of layers on the palm of my hand, let them dry, then peel it off. There wasn’t much to do in the late 60s/early 70s.
If I may take a moment to bring us into the present time, I must say that my recent visit to Five Below to stock up on Balloon Dog themed school supplies seriously filled me with giddy anticipation and made me think that anything was possible. After the initial mother lode, I went to another location and got a pink balloon dog Bluetooth speaker, some pens and small notepads that the first store didn’t have.
We weren’t rich, so no official Trapper Keepers for us.
Most others didn’t have one, either, so it wasn’t a very big deal.
I don’t remember getting particularly excited over specific things, but I do remember how neat it was when i got to move from crayons into color pencils. Also, getting the cool mechanical pencil with the clicker on the side (but I don’t think that was a back-to-school thing).
And we were too rural for any regular trips to K-Mart. There was one in the city that had a mall, but we did almost all of our shopping (and everything else) in a different city (which most people would call a “town”).
@callow I had one with something like 12 colors. The barrel was thicker than a hot dog, and my handwriting, never the best, suffered accordingly. One teacher wouldn’t let me use it in her class.
@edsa My dad covered my books with brown paper bags too, but he just lettered the name of the class and left the rest blank for me to write/draw on. I spent a lot of time in class doing that instead of paying attention.
I started off with Trapper Keepers being a big thing, but then I found Five Star binders to be better quality and switched. I was in middle school by then and didn’t need a fancy design anymore.
I will say that back in 1st grade, I was super excited to have my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pencil case though…until I got moved next to a guy who couldn’t spell (very nice guy, still actually Facebook friends with him) and would ask me like 8 times a day to see my pencil case so he could use it to spell “turtles” on his drawings. It got pretty old after that
@guyfromhawthorn@jouest Drew a super hero on my five star; called him “Five Star”. He was essentially a power ranger that kept repeating his name like a Pokemon whenever he did anything. (Punch the bad guy? “Five Stars!” Jump over a car? “Five Stars!” Run after a bus? “Five…! pantpant Stars!” Order ice cream? “Five stars (on Yelp)!”
@steeltoesenator I was waiting for someone to finally mention those. I have distinct memories of PeeChee folders. Odd that yours is the only comment mentioning them.
OK already said my embarrassing PE stories.
But worst part was in my last maybe Junior and Senior year I carried a briefcase. Samsonite, of course. It didn’t feel that weird and held a lot of stuff. Arguably way better than a backpack. I was already so far out of the cool popular people Cliques, it didn’t matter. Maybe even helped my image in a weird way. For reasons that I still don’t understand somehow I ended up being at least in the “tolerably cool” club and invited to parties my senior year. Weird times. I was glad to get to college. Also no more briefcase by that time.
@jouest@pmarin I carried a salesman’s sample case because it would hold everything that would otherwise have been stored in the locker that I did not dare use. (The assholes in the school promptly stole the lock off of whatever locker I was seen using, and trashed the contents in a particularly offensive manner. No one ever saw it happen.)
A “cartridge pen” - it was like a fountain pen, but had a snap in ink cartidge. Every September, I told my mom it was on the list of required supplies, and every year, she’d say “really?” but she’d buy it for me anyway. They cost more than a ball-point, but I always took good care of mine.
Haven’t thought about this for decades. Heading online to see if they are still sold. Probably not since we have gel pens now, but they’re not the same.
@RetreadNJ I liked those cartridge pens; since they had an actual nib, they wrote a lot nicer than ballpoint pens, especially for cursive. But ink was more expensive, and we didn’t have extra money, so I refilled my own from an ink bottle. Always had 1 or 2 refilled cartridges handy in a little plastic case, in blue, black, or blue black.
My son was never taught cursive and nobody seems to care about handwriting anymore. Everyone might as well be doctors.
Bonus points for showing your age based on enthusiasm for or ignorance of…Trapper Keepers.
@jouest What are these Trapper Keepers of which you speak? In my day, we got 3-ring binders covered in woven blue fabric and 2-pocket folders. If we were feeling really fancy, we’d get the ones that had a little insert to hold papers that you didn’t want to put in the binder.
@jouest @lisagd Honestly when I saw the question there was only one answer first in mind and that was it. I think there was a nostalgia reboot of it around 2005 might have one still. No idea why it went so viral but definitely did. It’s almost like the most basic marketing of something that’s useful and well designed, and people start talking about it, and then their friends get it, and then you want one, and make your parents drive you all around town to see if any store still has them. We are talking about the silly Stanley 40oz drink cups, right?
EDIT my original would have been in 1970’s some time. And it might still be in a box somewhere.
@jouest I came here to say TRAPPER KEEPER!!! It is the only correct answer
How about bonus points for the store shopped at? Granted, K-mart isn’t completely dead; they still have two stores left in the US.
@narfcake woolworth’s! Thanks for making me feel ancient!
@narfcake I miss red light specials. Or was that Copenhagen?
@narfcake @phendrick K-Mart was famous for its blue light special, if that’s what you’re thinking of.
@narfcake i used to work at Hardee’s and my friend got me a job at Kmart in the footwear department. wasn’t a better job, but it beat the hell out of coming home smelling like fry grease.
that said, kmart footwear shoppers were straight up monsters. they’d just drop the shoes and box on the ground after trying them on. not even the slightest effort to put them back on the shelf.
one shift, i was straightening up the kids shoes and a woman’s high heel hits the ground next to me. just one. i assume someone is messing with me and just go back to straightening. about a minute later, another one hits. i get up, go one aisle over to the women’s shoes, and there’s this lady frantically trying on different heels. she takes a box out, pulls out one, drops the box on the ground, tries on the aforementioned heel, and if it doesn’t fit, she throws it into the next aisle over (where i had been).
i watched her do this another time. she still hasn’t seen me, so i walk back over to the aisle i was in and start throwing the shoes back. one of them hits its mark and i hear a “WHAT THE HELL?!” from her. she storms over and says, “did you just throw a shoe at me??”. i just calmly said “i thought we were playing a game”. she runs off to tell a manager and then leaves the store. manager (good guy named Jim) comes over and asks what happened. i told him the story and he asks why i didn’t just ask her to stop throwing the shoes over the aisle. i said, “if you really have to explain to someone to not throw shoes, ya think they’ll actually listen?”
it would have been a great job except for the customers. that, and the girls working in layaway and women’s clothes were incredibly cute.
@narfcake @phendrick @xobzoo a red light special is more like “BOGO lapdance” night at the local gentlemen’s club
@carl669 @narfcake I LOVE THAT!
@narfcake @pakopako @phendrick @xobzoo Or maybe more like this
/youtube TLC - Red Light Special
@carl669 Every morning, the Target store in one of the most affluent parts of town starts the day with everything in the women’s clothing area neatly in place, a task which has consumed several hours of employee time during the prior evening and that morning. By 1PM, the floor is littered with things that have been pulled out, often carried to another part of the department, and dropped. Clerks try to make sweeps to pick up and rehang/refold/reshelve the items, but the asshole customers are always ahead of them.
At the second-busiest store in town, in a less affluent neighborhood, this problem is almost unknown.
@carl669 @narfcake
I loved Kmart and shopped there till they closed, they had some really good deals. Im sure I could still find something around my house brand new with tags on it from Kmart (socks or slipper socks). I got a pair of boots there right before they closed that go just above the knee, they’re my favorite pair of boots (I still have them too). I’ve been looking for years to find another pair like them but I can never find them.
Nothing more exciting than a fancy slide rule. I always looked forward to using my compass, protractor and variety of stencils.
@heartny Quick quiz: What were the K and CI scales used for?
@phendrick Whatever brain cells I had that would have known the answer to that quiz have left the building. I checked Google and the answer didn’t ring a bell for any of the remaining brain cells. They are content using a calculator now.
@heartny https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule_scale#Scales
unless you want to leave those memories dead and buried.
@heartny @phendrick That’s funny I had a math teacher that taught us slide rules and that was cool but already was able to buy a Litronix calculator with LED display and a mini Casio that also was a watch/alarm/stopwatch.
Also high school electronics teacher made us learn tubes first, then those newfangled transistor things. But turns out basic tubes are not that different from FETs which make up a large part of our electronic stuff today. (TL;DR coming so I will stop).
Also about the slide rules I was lucky we had the only computer lab in the district, 1970s. And we could use BASIC or FORTRAN, so definitely slide rules not needed annymore. Unfortunately was way too early for geeks to be cool so none of that scored me any points with the girls.
@heartny @phendrick @pmarin
OMG I had to learn FORTRAN 4 when I took college calculus. I had enough trouble with calculus because I had to also teach myself trig at the time (didn’t take it or pre calc in high school) let alone telling a fucking computer how to solve calculus problems.
And yeah BASIC… On an Apple 2e on campus I learned just enough to create a menu program where I could enter in which meals, how many people i was taking camping, and have a grocery list spit out.
I took Pascal because I thought it would be fun to know how to make card games. I then realized once I had figured out how to “solve” the problem I had no interest in writing the actual code, remove the typos, etc, to make it run. Wanted to delegate that.
When I designed a grad stats class last year I had to learn R (open source, free, can be used for stats program). SAS has some programming in it but not as much as R. I like menus!!! I am NOT a programer. I am a user. Who knew what I’d be forced to do against my will.
@heartny @Kid9sandliz @pmarin I taught Stat, but programming for it wasn’t in our syllabus back then, so never learned R / SAS, but have used / taught all your others plus a bunch of others (COBOL, PL/I, APL, PERL, LISP, ALGOL, various assemblies, …, i.e. anything old). Could have tutored you & shown you lots of tricks in the math, especially trig.
Well, K-mart didn’t exist yet, I did get a fancy slide ruler. Calculators cost thousands. But the schools still provided all the supplies
And i have decided your job is random weird topics.
For my offspring it was notebooks, spiral, and pocket with fantasy images, not girly fantasy but the works of … damn i can’t remember, started with an S, but you would see like tiger cubs in space. She is late Gen X, graduated high school in 1996
I’m a first year mother jones boomer, if you want to make that split, or mid boomer, the only girl in my advanced senior math class in high school and one of two in my high school physics class (taught by a woman, who looking back was probably a lesbian)
@Cerridwyn
With enough sticky notes and string, you can see how they all connect
@Cerridwyn @jouest With enough sticky notes, string, and intermediate points, it’s possible to connect virtually anything to virtually anything else.
@jouest @werehatrack
https://www.schimschimmel.com/
and yes, they were trapper keepers
@Cerridwyn @jouest @werehatrack Now I either want bacon or need to figure out how I connect to Kevin Bacon.
@jouest @pmarin @werehatrack khmmm bacon
The only back-to-school shopping that I can specifically recall was for the uniform shorts for Phys Ed in junior high. That was also the class in which I was reliably terrorized in the locker room, an activity which the PE teacher chose to ignore. Eventually, my parents found a way to get me a medical excuse so that I didn’t have to take it anymore. There were other factors involved that I could discuss, but mostly from a lack of knowledge rather than certainty about things that I have to guess. It was the 1960s. There were a lot of things that people understood differently in those days. That statement is hiding a multitude of things behind it.
@werehatrack it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
@Cerridwyn For me, almost exclusively the latter.
@Cerridwyn @werehatrack wow sorry to hear but that brings back memories for me too, but 1970s. I won’t go through the litany of abuses that would probably get people arrested or at least fired now. But hey it was the 70s. Had asthma at the time and that got me out but required meetings at the district superintendent, not just the principal. And then I was super-outcast because I got out of PE. Honestly would have benefitted from swimming, yoga, aerobics, stretching. But it was the 70s so basically football, baseball, and running.
I sported a trapper keeper or two. Never was too excited shopping for school stuff. Most stuff I see on lists now was provided by the school.
Lived close enough to ride my bike as a teenager to KMart to shop by myself and spend my hard-earned babysitting money on junk.
@speediedelivery Kmart is so well-represented in this thread!
@jouest @speediedelivery yeah that is kind of funny about Kmart. I’m still remembering the last few times I was in one and my thoughts are “so really you guys are still in business?” “Does anybody ever clean this place?” “How many dead bodies do you usually expect in the parking lot each morning?”
What about school clothes, I remember that I would get a new pair of rustler jeans and a pair of fake converse shoes
Ah, the taste of fresh Elmer’s glue.
@phendrick I used to like to spread a bunch of layers on the palm of my hand, let them dry, then peel it off. There wasn’t much to do in the late 60s/early 70s.
If I may take a moment to bring us into the present time, I must say that my recent visit to Five Below to stock up on Balloon Dog themed school supplies seriously filled me with giddy anticipation and made me think that anything was possible. After the initial mother lode, I went to another location and got a pink balloon dog Bluetooth speaker, some pens and small notepads that the first store didn’t have.
@heartny Jeff Koons lives! (but also I think is indeed also just still alive)
@heartny @jouest Jeff Koons is indeed still alive and exhibiting in space.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/22/style/jeff-koons-moon-phases-odysseus-landing/index.html
@jouest @mossygreen Apparently he also lives at Five Below, which may be nicer than the moon.
@heartny I checked-out at Hello Kitty days.
And the Moon sounds good but I’m Counting on Elon to bring me to Mars.
We weren’t rich, so no official Trapper Keepers for us.
Most others didn’t have one, either, so it wasn’t a very big deal.
I don’t remember getting particularly excited over specific things, but I do remember how neat it was when i got to move from crayons into color pencils. Also, getting the cool mechanical pencil with the clicker on the side (but I don’t think that was a back-to-school thing).
And we were too rural for any regular trips to K-Mart. There was one in the city that had a mall, but we did almost all of our shopping (and everything else) in a different city (which most people would call a “town”).
@xobzoo
Wow you grew up in the boondocks huh? Is it still like that there?
A new beginning with new “copybooks”, pens, and No2 pencils was always exciting. If you were rich you had one of these pens. We were not.
@callow I had one with something like 12 colors. The barrel was thicker than a hot dog, and my handwriting, never the best, suffered accordingly. One teacher wouldn’t let me use it in her class.
@callow @lisagd the ones with more than four colors were a monument to humanity’s hubris
@callow @jouest Yeah, who thought someone would ever use yellow ink on white paper?
@callow @lisagd Currently available at my Sam’s Club.
https://www.samsclub.com/p/bic-4-color-retractable-ballpoint-pens-variety-pack-7-count/P990332722?xid=plp_product_1
I couldn’t resist buying a couple packs for a buck per pen.
@callow @phendrick Cool! I’ll have to ask my SIL to get them for me next time she’s at Sam’s.
My dad would make the best text book covers with paper bags. They were works of art. And new spiral notebooks. Math was always green.
@edsa math is objectively green, yes
@edsa My dad covered my books with brown paper bags too, but he just lettered the name of the class and left the rest blank for me to write/draw on. I spent a lot of time in class doing that instead of paying attention.
@edsa @jouest Until it gets graded…
I was a red-pen-wielder, but at college level.
@edsa @lisagd Mom taught us how to do that. As kids we always wanted the cloth stretchy ones. We had to spend our own money on them.
@edsa @Kidsandliz Cloth stretchy ones?! When I was a kid, we didn’t have anything fancy like that.
I was such a nerd; I couldn’t let go of my two-sided pencil case.
I started off with Trapper Keepers being a big thing, but then I found Five Star binders to be better quality and switched. I was in middle school by then and didn’t need a fancy design anymore.
I will say that back in 1st grade, I was super excited to have my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pencil case though…until I got moved next to a guy who couldn’t spell (very nice guy, still actually Facebook friends with him) and would ask me like 8 times a day to see my pencil case so he could use it to spell “turtles” on his drawings. It got pretty old after that
@guyfromhawthorn a FiveStar five subject notebook made me feel like I could do anything
@guyfromhawthorn @jouest Drew a super hero on my five star; called him “Five Star”. He was essentially a power ranger that kept repeating his name like a Pokemon whenever he did anything. (Punch the bad guy? “Five Stars!” Jump over a car? “Five Stars!” Run after a bus? “Five…! pantpant Stars!” Order ice cream? “Five stars (on Yelp)!”
I’m from the era that used Pee Chee folders. Trapper Keepers came along during my kid’s school years.
@steeltoesenator I was waiting for someone to finally mention those. I have distinct memories of PeeChee folders. Odd that yours is the only comment mentioning them.
OK already said my embarrassing PE stories.
But worst part was in my last maybe Junior and Senior year I carried a briefcase. Samsonite, of course. It didn’t feel that weird and held a lot of stuff. Arguably way better than a backpack. I was already so far out of the cool popular people Cliques, it didn’t matter. Maybe even helped my image in a weird way. For reasons that I still don’t understand somehow I ended up being at least in the “tolerably cool” club and invited to parties my senior year. Weird times. I was glad to get to college. Also no more briefcase by that time.
@pmarin it isn’t a proper school without the one briefcase kid.
@jouest @pmarin I carried a salesman’s sample case because it would hold everything that would otherwise have been stored in the locker that I did not dare use. (The assholes in the school promptly stole the lock off of whatever locker I was seen using, and trashed the contents in a particularly offensive manner. No one ever saw it happen.)
My mother got me the kind of black leather backpack that schoolkids use in Japan. It was well-made, sturdy, sensible, and it made me miserable.
Nobody else used anything remotely similar and other kids made fun of it. I survived, somehow. (I wonder what happened to it … )
A “cartridge pen” - it was like a fountain pen, but had a snap in ink cartidge. Every September, I told my mom it was on the list of required supplies, and every year, she’d say “really?” but she’d buy it for me anyway. They cost more than a ball-point, but I always took good care of mine.
Haven’t thought about this for decades. Heading online to see if they are still sold. Probably not since we have gel pens now, but they’re not the same.
@RetreadNJ I liked those cartridge pens; since they had an actual nib, they wrote a lot nicer than ballpoint pens, especially for cursive. But ink was more expensive, and we didn’t have extra money, so I refilled my own from an ink bottle. Always had 1 or 2 refilled cartridges handy in a little plastic case, in blue, black, or blue black.
My son was never taught cursive and nobody seems to care about handwriting anymore. Everyone might as well be doctors.
@RetreadNJ still sold. (doesn’t make your writing pretty automatically, though.)