> People with kids sometimes experience this via all the activities they take their kids to

This is something welcome I didn’t expect to come from parenthood. Like many others I had thought to myself “how do you even make new friends in your thirties?!” and then once I had kids… bam. New friendship groups.

For us the local park and playground are a great equalizer in terms of economic stratification. But when the weather turns bad it rears its head again as people head to $50 a go trampoline parks and the like.

Public school is another unifier, of course. I’m in NYC and our preschool was very obviously not a reflection of the neighborhood or city around us. But once my kids entered the city-funded Pre-K they started to meet a ton of kids from different backgrounds. It’s very different from the childhood I had but I’m very glad my kids have it.

Putnam's "Bowling Alone" (2000) is about this, and it is something that has been in decline since the 1950s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone.

Yea, agreed completely here.

I spent so many hours at our local mall with my friends growing up. It had an arcade, a movie theater, book store, game store, place to eat. Our parents could just drop us there for hours. Skating rinks and bowling alleys were also a solid option.

It's one of the things that make it worth the time investment to follow sports, even if you're typically not interested in it. Getting people together to watch the game, go to games, tailgate, etc is huge.

The internet has largely replaced / substituted this, which has been a mixed thing. Like minded people in smaller niches have been able to find each other online for example, much more than IRL, and much more at long range / internationally. It's made the world a smaller place, at the cost of knowing people closer to home.

Libraries are daycare for the homeless. At one city's public library, one of the librarians was mopping up vomit and was heard to comment, "I didn't go to library school for this." Washrooms double as a place to shower, reading rooms a place to sleep.

I was thinking about the loss of local shops a lot recently. There's definitely a confluence of factors at play, and it's not just price economics vs online & big box.

One thing I think is that theres just never enough time. Everyone is so over-scheduled. The white collar work day really has expanded vs what I remember my dad doing 30-40 years ago. There's more two income households than in the past. Parenting is far more active for both parents than it's ever been, and kids are being shuttled between events all weekend.

Most local shops are not open past 5pm or at best 6pm, and often closed Sunday. Who is off work by then to stop by?

Easier to click buy on amazon, and stop by the big box store after dinner Saturday open til 9pm for anything you need sooner.

I don't think that's really what we've lost. Blockbuster was a third space not because of its staff, but because it was a place you could say "meet me here" and hang out looking at movies with no (or very little) expected monetary output. Same as arcades in the mall, or cheap matinee movies. A better framing might be where would a teenager, today, say "meet me here" to their friends. I think you'll find there's many fewer around you today than there was 20 years ago.

Whenever I see these sorts of stories I think about the civic life we're missing out on by not socially gathering with our neighbors to hunt down woolly mammoths with sharp sticks so we don't all collectively starve to death.

The way things are going maybe we'll get back to those wonderful days. ;)

Places don't need to be curated to have value as civic spaces, although it certainly helps. Seniors hang out at the local McDonalds, car modding enthusiasts gather in strip mall parking lots, singles meet at the dog park...

Any place you have to physically go to provides a chance for social interaction. To debate your friends over what movie to pick, to comment on your neighbor's selections, to ask a clerk for a recommendation. Are these pretty slight? Sure, but life is made fuller by these minor brushes, and you never know which ones will unexpectedly bloom into something more.

half the article is nostalgia for the blockbuster job

The one where narrators have rose-colored glasses?

The author does make an authentic point about bored/maladjusted clerks messing with customers. I had one fill in what was apparently my nickname in the message-of-the-day on a receipt, a mean slur about my appearance. Of course, that isn't unknown today, when a human processes a transaction which has been flagged. Take a closer look at Youtube video IDs sometime. (My ex and her friends did it to me on a real estate site, on the listing for a childhood home.) /shrug

Perhaps the clerk was not sullen, and just preferred to stay out of other people's affairs. You're not allowed to rent here anymore!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEEj6d3GTOU

I don't think any movie could better capture the atmosphere and culture of a 1980s video store better than "Clerks." For example, the various types of annoying video store customers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9khHJTztKk

Ordering obscene videos from the warehouse:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwFjw798mPI

And some period-era fanfic filmed in an IRL video rental store.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiPC2pIJNzc

Maybe I missed out on the phenomenon he's talking about.

You did. It was a fairly widespread thing.

Although "The video store was always just a means to an end for me" indicates that you excluded yourself from this, rather than missing out on it.

That's a really good idea!

It's weird when shops pivot. There was a record store in a neighboring village that went from vinyl to video game kiosks. Then the record store that became a candy store. Put couches in bookstores and people stop buying books. I guess they figure the rent is paid by benefactors. Then again, Barnes & Noble seems to have a partnership with Starbucks...

> more romanticizing of the bygone era. late fees (due at midnight!), restocking fees, etc; some of these fees to the tune of a new dvd/vhs; good riddance

Well, they were a business after all. And what's being romanticised is the civic experience of that bygone era. The modern experience sucks. It is devoid of any real human interaction. That is highly missing part in the modern landscape and it will only get worse.

You forgot the $2 charge for rewinding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K97bkACYWLY

That's true and when the Netflix DVD service arrived, I thought it was really a situation where the consumer had finally won. (No late fees! Yay!). That said here in Boulder we had the Video Station which was a phenomenal place for browsing and discovery with a super knowledgeable staff especially for foreign and art house cinema. They survived for a surprisingly long time, but finally closed about ten years ago [0]. Not long ago, while cleaning out an old (manual transmission -- another artifact of a bygone era) car I found a Video Station receipt which I still have. Good times!

[0] https://www.dailycamera.com/2017/02/27/the-video-station-bou...

Every era can be romanticized, and every era has its downsides. Just today, I could ramble on about the ever-increasing costs of streaming services as they reduce their available catalogs, ads forced upon users who have purchased the "ad-free" streaming bundle, UI/UX patterns designed to make cancelling difficult, things you've "purchased" no longer being available to you because the service no longer carries that studio's titles, paying up to $24.99 to "rent" a movie on Amazon for a mere 48 hours, the endless cycle of a service starting out "great" only to be enshittified, etc.

A bit cruel and there were probably some indie stores that were different but I remember video rentals as a place where you went in, grabbed a movie, and left.

that already happened. The early days of Facebook as a user were much different than what they became later on.

I used to do a lot of chit-chat with folks I knew on Twitter during the work day. After Musk largely torched it and a lot of people just decided they didn't need that kind of social media any longer, that channel largely went away. I use Facebook some but not the same and LinkedIn even less so.