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.
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?
Print Newspapers
“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.
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.
Parking Meters
Municipalities are nowhere near close to stop ticketing people for parking violations. Still, people running to feed the meter before getting a ticket are about to become something you only see in old movies. So is putting on your reading glasses to read the fine print on the meter.
With new, modern apps taking over the place of outdated parking meters, fishing for coins in your purse is a sight that is getting less and less frequent.