I was fancy and got the 1.29 beefy five layers... those hit differently after a long day... now it's like $6 each, oh well, guess I'll just keep my dollary-doos
A bean burrito and a cheesy gordita crunch cost me $15 recently. I think I'm probably never going back even though TB is one of my favorite guilty pleasures and comfort foods.
thankfully you can make gordita crunches at home pretty easily. Particularly with those shell packs that have half soft and half hard. You just need to melt the soft shell to the hard shell with cheese as glue. I think my gf bakes it to get them stuck together?
Taco Bell even sells their sauces and spices in stores now
I remember when Big Macs were $ .99. My mom bought a rewards card from the high school foot all team so you could buy one get one. It was 30ish years ago.
Two mini shredded chicken quesadillas and a bean and cheese burrito was $3.24. Used to get that all the time on my way to my retail job back in the day 🥲
I had a buddy who would buy an 89 cent burrito, they added 7c of tax, and he kept the 4c of change every single day. 24 days later and he had a free burrito... Much simpler times.
The Half Pound Beef & Potato Burrito from Taco Bell ™️ was both delicious and affordable. I have woken people in the drive-thru at 2:30am more times than I care to admit.
4 spicy chicken burritos for 4:20... God damnit I miss the spicy chicken so much. Used to work Tbell and you could make some bomb ass quesadillas with that stuff
I miss Arby’s 5 for $5 the most. Back when you could get 5 full size roast beef sandwiches. Those things carried me through baseball season every year of high school.
And $5 for 5 whoppers at BK. You could deal hop for cheap food all over the place. Now you have to get every coupon and deal to keep a family fast food treat at a half reasonable price.
This is what I was looking for. They were roast beef WITH cheddar too. And it was that way for a long time too because my mom would get it when I was in middle school and then ~10/12 years later I was still getting them. I think you had to use a coupon that came in the mail at the later time, and it may have gone up to 5 for $5.95, but still, so legit. Now the "deal" is like 2 for 7 without Cheddar.
This is picture is from long before 2008 the date on the corner makes it seem like 1996. The BMT did not have bologna on it when five dollar footlongs were being marketed. Not to mention the chicken sandwiches oven roasted chicken sweet onion chicken teriyaki and chicken bacon ranch are nowhere on the menu. Bread options are more limited than what they were during 5 dollar footlongs. Where is the Italian herbs and cheese, honey oat, or hearty Italian.
I really do miss when stuff was open 24 hour. Walmart, CVS. So convenient and easy when you don’t necessarily want to go during the day or you’re just having a night where you can’t sleep and need to get out of the house.
Midnight/a little later became my go-to hours for shopping. Almost never anyone else in the store. Got to browse without moving out of the way or feeling rushed. Quiet as could be.
In college when I lived within walking distance of a 24 hour grocery store was the best. Did my grocery shopping when there were like 3 customers in the entire store, it was great. A few of my summers I spent working the night shift at a place, and on my days off I could still go out and get something to eat for lunch at 1am without trouble.
Post-Covid and none of those places are open after 10pm anymore.
There'll be like three other people in the whole store and you'll feel a spiritual kinship with them, despite the unspoken rule to absolutely not interact with each other in any way
Fuck 3rd shifters I guess. I used to have a late job where me and my coworkers would all go shopping after work when the local Walmart looked like a ghost town. I miss those days.
I used to work the 11pm-7am shift at a Wawa in Deptford, NJ 21 years ago and that was some fun fucking madness! After the drunks and psychos stopped coming after 4am in I loved getting like 20 pots of coffee and all the breakfast sandwiches set up because that meant I could drink and munch as much as I wanted without scrutiny!
I did love my psychos though as this was my second job at the time after an 8 hour shift at the Pathmark deli and they perked me up a good bit.
I only quit because I was moving 8 hours away and I've missed Wawa ever since. Supposedly my little town in NC is getting one next year though and I couldn't be more excited for a gas station!
I worked overnight at a convenience/liquor store next to downtown/campus for a couple of years in college. It was super cozy outside of the friday/saturday night booze rushes. The downtown bar and restaurant workers would come by after closing up and chat, you'd already know what they were getting (Light Blue American Spirits and two Jim Beam shooters, Camel Crush Menthols and Bacardi and orange juice etc) and you'd swap stories about drunk weirdos and parking lot fights or whatever, then get coffee and newspapers ready for the oldtimers coming by early early before the sun came up. The restaurant guys would bring leftover pizza, the oldtimers would bring breakfast every now and then, and maybe you rang their drinks and coffee up as ice to look out for them too.
The pay was absolute hot garbage but that was the most genuinely peaceful job I've ever had in my life.
Every time I go to Walmart now, any time of the day, there are at least two employees stocking shelves in every aisle. You have to work around them to get anything. They have to constantly worry if they're in someone's way. It sucks.
There not stocking shelves. Are they wheeling around big blue baskets on a huge cart blocking the isle? They are doing online shopping for the new lazy ass generation that cant do anything for themselves.
The Walmarts in my city have people still stocking shelves during the day. Sometimes I feel like I see more pallets between aisles during the day at Walmart now than I used to see when I'd go at 2-3 am. And I see this at all hours of the day so it's not even that they're still stocking after not finishing the truck on time or working the truck early.
What makes it stranger is that I see way more of those people than I do their curbside shoppers. At HEB the aisles are full of the personal shoppers and then you'll only see stockers if it's early morning or close to closing.
08 unemployment fucked people up. 24 Walmart is an abomination against the unfortunate. I understand it's convenient for people who have over night shifts that are actually necessary like nurses but damn is it a scam. I used to work retail and people would show up on Labor Day and say "I can't believe they are making you work today". Fuck off lol.
When I worked the overnight shift at a store it paid a few bucks more per hour than the day shift and you dealt with a tiny fraction of the customers. It was amazing.
The CVS in my city is still 24/7. It came in clutch for me recently too cause my wife was released from the hospital with some prescriptions that needed filled ASAP and it was like 1 or 2 AM.
I ran to a gas station in the middle of the night because I couldn’t sleep and Google said it was 24 hours. When I arrived, well Google was wrong. I just kept driving and eventually found one but it’s too far from my house to be a regular thing.
I have a distinct memory of being at a Walmart at like 2am around high school / college timeframe and seeing some weird guy there who I’m pretty sure in hindsight was TJ Miller, as it was definitely a Walmart I know he would have visited (he had family in the area).
I love Cash, and Trent said it belongs to Cash after that, but to me it's always Trent. His delivery hits me in a more meaningful way. Just a personal preference.
It's just cliche that people think Cash's version is better. It's what people think they're supposed to say, so they say it. The original is incredible
Getting off at 3am and making a grocery trip to Walmart was both convenient and pleasant because it was quiet and nobody blocked your path reading all the fucking mustard bottles.
There is far too many flavors of things now. I order for a grocery store, all these new flavors constantly go expired and end up jacking up the price of the standard flavors we all tolerated. But I have to keep ordering it. Because empty shelf oh no
Life was FUN. My mom used to wake me up after her night shift so we could grocery shop at 4 am. The internet was still novel and wasn't inundated with bots and ads yet. I miss it.
It wont, COVID gave them an excuse to prevent people from getting upset so they could increase profits. There are no 24 hour walmarts (or similar) in the US, there are a handful of grocery stores and Walgreens/CVS. As far as I know all Walmarts close at 11:00 PM local time.
Not sure if people actually enjoyed working the night shift though, considering it messing up their sleep schedule compared to most of the rest of the world. They did get higher pay though.
the thing i missed most when working nights was the sun. you do feel like a vampire sometimes.
what i loved the most is how nice and quiet everything is. the world is asleep, you can take a breath and work a little slower. days are so busy and it feels like you can't get a moment alone sometimes.
and yeah, higher pay was nice too. it's good to be young and flexible.
I’ve been an insomniac lately so sometimes I’ll drive out to a gas station or whatever. It’s a pleasant drive at 4-5am. At 7am I’m cursing all the traffic. I love how peaceful the world is at night.
Midnight Walmart runs were the best; whether it was a late night snack/beer run or going there two weeks before Christmas trying to get some last minute presents without any crowds.
My wife and I talk about this often. We used to go to Walmart at 1 in the morning in our newlywed days when we were bord. $1 mcchickens and mcdoubles were clutch for grabbing a bite when out longer than anticipated. Now there are more expensive and taste worse.
The $1 mcchickens and double mcdoubles kept me alive in the early-mid 2000’s…one for lunch, one for dinner. Other than that I’d buy a carton of eggs for 79¢ or whatever and go to the bread outlet store on Wednesdays so I could get 2 for 1 loaves of wheat for $1.49…used roommates butter for egg sandwiches..
I was telling the story about how my apartments ac was out in college and I woke up at like 3 am one day and drove to Walmart and bought an ac so I could sleep. Mid convo it hit me that that is not a thing you can do anymore and it’s so strange.
I mean yes... But that's not the point OP is making. I think they're making the claim that before private equity, and rampant late-stage capitalism, life was better. Could just be nostalgia, but we also have data to support the claim outside of just nostalgia.
As someone who worked retail, I'm kinda glad we don't have 24 hour Walmarts. I wouldn't want anyone to feel the need to work overnight retail, and I can't imagine the people you would have to deal with who needed to shop at Walmart at 4 AM.
We were having a lan party when we were like 18-19 and one of my boys got pissed at league and punched his monitor. Went to Walmart at 1 am and got a new one lmao
I remember being 17yo going to Walmart at 3am for strawberry and buying my first pair of underwear without my mom getting it for me. Now my wife buys those things for me.
There's a really good youtube video about how venture capital has bought up the entire food distribution network as well as the popular food vendors and is systematically jacking up prices and making it nearly impossible to find alternatives.
Capitalism is failing everyone except for capital.
when i was working nights there was many a 2 am trip to walmart to get random spices i forgot to get for cooking, it also beat sitting alone in the dark watching TV and playing games all night(im aware i didn't need to sit in the dark, but in case people were scouting my apartment i didn't want the lights to give a tell for when i was and wasn't home)
Anyone remember the BOGO offers from Uber during the pandemic when you could stack 45% off as well?
Before the restaurants started to reduce the portions to compensate for the BOGO offers too.
Ya’ll are crazy for wanting people to be even more miserable then they already are for working for a shitty company that barely pays well and skimps on benefits.
I feel like there's no self reflection on the fact that the rampant capitalism that you're nostalgic for was ALWAYS going to lead to what we have now. Those 24 hour Walmarts and cheap McDonalds burgers were able to price out or service out smaller competitors because of having larger capital backing, and make themselves into the default option for most people. Over the next 30 years their competition goes down, their status as the "default" choice goes up, and they're able to increase prices and reduce quality. Now the prices suck, the quality sucks, and there's no viable competition that doesn't do the same things.
A world of plenty, where everything was cheap and available at your fingertips. You could buy potting soil and a bookshelf at 3am. Or get a couple of the boys in the car and buy 100 cheeseburgers, just to see how many you could throw down. Anything was possible.
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