I grew up in a really small town that hadn’t been updated in decades.
Our grocery store was still largely the same since it was built in the 1950s.
If you wanted the experience of going back in time, all you needed to do was visit our city. When I brought back a friend to visit from college one time, they were shocked at how old everything in the city was. The bowling alley had a roof that leaked and arcade games that had been installed in the early 1980s. When I was growing up, it was even worse here. There was never anything to do for anybody under the age of 40. And once you hit the age of 21, you would likely go to sports bars and get drunk with friends. Back in the day we had a laundromat with the oldest machines inside. It was fortunately fairly cheap to do laundry there because of how old all of the amenities were. I had to go to that laundromat for a solid year when my parents couldn’t afford to replace our clothes dryer. It broke down and we didn’t have room outside to put up clothes lines. I would take all of our loads wet over to the laundromat to dry them. The worst thing about that laundromat was the lack of any heating or cooling. I lived in an area with fairly extreme seasons year-round. In the winter and Autumn season, it would get really cold outside and we would feel it inside the laundromat. I honestly think the cold temperatures made it take longer for the clothing to dry. And then once the late spring and early summer rolled around, temperatures would get excruciatingly hot outside. These days I live in a place with newer built businesses and laundromats that all have heating and cooling inside.