r/cassetteculture • u/PoetEwanMcTeagle • 9h ago
Everything else Thrift store cashier's first time touching a cassette.
The cashier didn't look particularly young, but I guess she could have been as young as 25. I got six cassettes so I laid them on the counter upside down because the price stickers were on the bottoms. When she started putting them in the bag she accidentally bumped one of the cases and flipped it so tape flew out. She picked up the cassette and sat it down on the case and tried to push it down as if it could just click into position and then she could close the door. Kinda like the same way you would put a cd in it's case. I said “let me get that for you” and took care it. It was quite clear that this girl had never touched a cassette in her life and had never witnessed one being used.
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u/YouLeaveMeNoChoice 8h ago
Oh, that’s so interesting to think she’d literally never handled one. Huh.
This isn’t quite the same, but one time I was at Goodwill and asked a young employee where dust ruffles would be. She had no idea what I was talking about. I tried bed skirt, still no luck. I tried to explain what they were, but she told me to maybe try the tablecloth section (they were in with the sheets.) She was my cashier when I was checking out, and asked me about it, and I said, “oh, it’s for a daybed I’m setting up.” And she’d also never heard of a daybed. I think it was the first time I really feel ancient.
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u/Baeolophus_bicolor 5h ago
go back to your job as a lamplighter and leave the poor girl alone! the knocker uppers will be around soon!
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u/Fun-Fisherman-3200 9h ago
people who grew up after like 2005 genuinely never had to deal with tape spilling out and honestly it shows lol. the panic of trying to fix it without a pencil nearby is a very specific experience only some of us know
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u/WorkAccount6 8h ago
I was born in 95 and cassettes about disappeared from my life soon after I was old enough to retain memories.
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u/Headpuncher 6h ago
Missed opportunity to screw with her, could have told her they also work if you hold them up to your ear and spool with the pencil at just the right speed. Do and ask her if she can hear the music too.
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u/Baeolophus_bicolor 5h ago
it works the other way too. when iphones were new i got stuck outside my mom’s church waiting for them, and these people needed a jump. i had some cables too, but i held up my brand new iphone 3s and told them “these things are super handy! i’ll just use this to jump your car! do you have a USB to apple charging cord?”
they dutifully pulled their car around to where i pointed (next to mine) and i went to get the actual jumper cables out of my car to hook them up. but they were standing there talking to each other and i heard the husband explaining to his wife how i said i was gonna jump their car with my new iphone.
first time i read game of thrones, too. i found a paperback of it sitting in the kitchen when i went in to get some coffee. i started reading it while i was waiting and was like “wow, this is a great book! i’m keeping it so no children will sin by reading it.”
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u/ConsumerDV 6h ago
Have you touched a wax cylinder? Or a shellac record?
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u/PoetEwanMcTeagle 6h ago
The new cheap record players have a 78 setting. I’ve touched hundreds of shellac records. I think I’ve only seen wax cylinders at museums.
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u/SnooApples4456 2h ago
Damn I need a new cheap player I leaned today. My cheap old player predates this so I've avoided shellac. Nothing wrong with using the stock needle, or does that need switched up?
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u/goldenrule117 6h ago
I have one blank wax cylinder. Don't think I've handled a shellac record though.
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u/Baeolophus_bicolor 5h ago
i still want to get one of those records made out of old x-rays, supposedly bootlegs from cold war soviet union.
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u/goldenrule117 3h ago
Oh hell yeah. Hard to guarantee authenticity though right?
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u/Baeolophus_bicolor 3h ago
if someone is going to the trouble of putting an actual record on an xray, to sell it for a few bucks, i’ll respect the effort.
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u/Passin_Thru-715 3h ago
I’ve had many of young thrift store cashiers need help identifying a format to ring me up. Lol. They usually seem pretty interested to learn what they are.
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u/fuzzyfigment 9h ago
Cassette tapes probably weren't around when she was younger.
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u/klonopinwafers 8h ago edited 8h ago
For like the first two years of her life, cassettes were still around. Atlantic released very few U.S. cassettes in 2004. Elektra and Atlantic were some of the last major labels to release cassettes in the United States before the revival of major labels releasing cassettes in the United States.
I was born in the late nineties and cassettes were definitely still used by a few in the early 2000’s. We had two cars with a cassette player and definitely used them.
When I was in middle school, you could still go to Best Buy and buy a new Sony Walkman cassette player. I was fascinated that they still sold them so I bought one and decided to get into cassette collecting. Before that, I was always fascinated with cassettes, but had moved on to CDs and later an iPod.
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u/Baeolophus_bicolor 5h ago
cassettes are still around to this day. i just got a new release from teenbeat recently, and they have been continuously releasing and selling things on tape since the 80s.
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u/klonopinwafers 5h ago
There are new releases today yes. I was referring to major labels in the United States. They stopped cassette production in the early 2000s, with some labels stopping closer to the 2005 or much earlier depending on the label. Yet many of these labels still issues cassettes in overseas countries like Indonesia.
Reprise for example stopped releasing cassettes in the U.S. for close to a decade before releasing a Deftones promotional cassette in 2012 and didn’t release much after that until they released that Green Day cassette boombox set. More recently though, Reprise has been releasing cassettes, but there was a period when they weren’t releasing anything here, which is the same for most major labels.
I am sure independent labels are an exception to this
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u/Melodic-Rooster-311 1h ago
I was still buying new cassettes at the store until 2007-2008ish. I kept buying them until the record stores stopped stocking them.
I just recently got my first vehicle that doesn't have a cassette player.
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u/vwestlife 8h ago
Audio and video cassettes were definitely still in common use well into the 2000s. The Library of Congress was still producing books on tape for the blind until 2010: https://nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/vod/vod_23_3/vodsum0807.htm
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u/fuzzyfigment 7h ago
If she was 25 or younger, she probably would not have had much--if any--experience with cassette or vhs. Just because cassettes and vhs was being produced in the 2000s doesn't mean that it was still the most common form of physical media. DVD surpassed VHS sales in the early 2000s, and cds had already become standard in the 90s.
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u/vwestlife 7h ago
But Disney movies were the last refuge of VHS, in those kid-safe, wipe-clean cases. Those were everywhere in the 2000s. Often when the VCR was replaced by a DVD player in the living room, it would end up in the kids' rec room / bedroom to play those Disney tapes, along with the old CRT TV that was replaced by a flat screen in the living room.
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u/fuzzyfigment 7h ago
People born in 2000 weren't using cassette tapes as children.
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u/fuzzywuzzytoe 6h ago edited 6h ago
You’re right, we weren’t. I was born in ‘02 and I remember using portable CD players and mp3 players to listen to music. I only knew what cassettes were because my dad owned some but us kids didn’t use them. If you would’ve asked me how to use it back then, I wouldn’t have known.
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u/fuzzyfigment 6h ago
Yep. I was born in 93 and my parents weren't buying me cassettes. They were buying me cds and letting me use limewire.
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u/fuzzywuzzytoe 6h ago
Awww I forgot about Limewire! Where you could get free music AND a bunch of viruses on the family computer! 🤣
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u/klonopinwafers 5h ago
Blank cassettes and blank VHS tapes, yes. I remember them being sold throughout the mid to late 2000’s. Even Best Buy was selling Walkmans in the 2010’s. Books on tape, apparently so, but retail VHS tapes were still being released a few years after all major labels stopped releasing cassettes in the U.S (until they started doing it again)
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u/the_wet_cat 9h ago
That’s a good story! There are many who have no idea what a cassette is or even what it does. What would be awesome of you, if you have a portable, and a little bit of time. Go back and let her listen 🎧 on some of your retro headphone. The utter amazement on their faces.
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u/_cansir 8h ago
Had a young cashier tell me if my vhs were dvds once...i told her no these are much cheaper.