“Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” print newspapers are just about out the door as that busy paperboy. Simply put – this world works quickly, print doesn’t. And by the time a news article gets printed, it’s no longer new.
Newspapers often try to overcome that shift by maintaining an up-to-date website and charging less for an online subscription. This is another step closer to a paper-free world.
Shopping Malls
Ghost malls are nothing new. In the past few years, those vacant buildings have been looking like something out of a horror movie. In fact, in 2019, there were more than 8,600 retail stores closed in US malls alone.
This doesn’t mean people don’t shop. On the contrary, people shop a lot both in big chain stores as well as small businesses. It’s just that more and more physical shopping malls are being shut down as people choose to stay in their pajamas and shop online.
Hard Drives
Backing your computer’s content on an external hard drive used to be such an essential. People in the early 2000s were always looking for drives with the biggest storage space possible and schlepping them around.
Years came and went and cloud services such as Google Drive and Dropbox made those hard drives a thing of the past. People prefer storing their information on such clouds rather than carrying it with them, and honestly, who could blame them?
Pennies
Penny for your thoughts? Well, that phrase is going to become pretty worthless pretty soon, as pennies are slowly disappearing. Soon, they will become a collectors’ item, paradoxically worth more than they did when we actually used them.
Now that people are using credit cards to buy almost anything, those little copper coins are simply no longer needed. In fact, other than making our wallets jingle with useless change, there isn’t much pennies can do for us anymore.
Answering Machines
Another thing that can be found more easily in a movie than in real life is an answering machine. Once an ingenious invention, revolutionizing the world through voice mail, it is now becoming obsolete. Not only that, but people nowadays often avoid leaving and listening to voice messages, ditching them for written texts.
The only ones using voice messages today are the older generation and those who contact them frequently. The modern reincarnation of answering machines is recorded messages sent as part of a text chain. Apparently, that form of recording is not as frowned upon.