The smells haven’t gone away, you’re just acclimated now
Now they all smell like weed. I actually wish people who smoked weed were more attentive to how they stink, because it’s also very gross.
A lot of countries still do. Japan has changed a lot in the 15isj years since I first came and even more in the decade I’ve been living here
Wish I could still buy one of those.
Yeah, it was weird. Most restaurants had a non-smoking section because allowing people to smoke everywhere was the norm. Leaded gasoline. Little kids playing with real fireworks. The 70s and 80s were a wild ride of irresponsibility.
It wasn’t all bad, though. It was cool being a kid at times. Playing outside almost every day until dinner time with the other kids in the neighborhood.
They had smoking/non-smoking sections into the 90s and early 2000s in Texas. I remember very clearly that my parents would have to ask for seats away from the bar if the restaurant had one, because they almost always allowed smoking. Also hotel rooms being smoking/non-smoking, and you could tell when a hotel was cheap and just swapped the door sign.
Don’t forget no cell phones. It’s hard to overstate the (I believe negative) impact constant connection and notification has had on every aspect of our lives
Some boomer on Facebook recently posted a meme with a photo of a rotary phone and how those were better days, and I had to laugh because they decidedly weren’t. When we had no answering machine or call waiting, and had to hang around for phone calls that might come, or have the car break down on the side of the road and hope that someone would stop and help you and that they weren’t a serial killer, that was purely awful. We actually had a serial killer couple abducting and killing teenage girls in my city before cell phones existed, and they made tapes of them raping and torturing these girls before they killed them. A cell phone would probably have helped them a lot. Those girls went through hell, they even raped and ended up accidentally killing her teenage sister.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/paul-bernardo-and-karla-homolka-case
There also weren’t people broadcasting mass shootings live on Facebook and inspiring copycat shootings, or being indoctrinated into incel culture alone in their bedrooms. There are legitimate pros and legitimate cons to 24/7 connection, this isn’t just some “boomer yells at the sky” thing
That’s why I would say that cell phones are fine. It’s when they turned into smartphones where I would draw the line. I just get the feeling that we’d be a lot better off if mobile phone tech never advanced much further than the mid-2000’s flip phone.
Totally agree with this
YES. Flip phones were fine and were enough to handle all the problems mentioned about pre-cellphones. Calls, texts, voice mail. All the new problems mentioned are caused BY smartphones. If the meme showed a Nokia flip phone it would have been perfect.
It’s decidedly worse for mental health. Despite living in the safest times in living memory, we are biased to think our cities are dangerous and economies are failing because of doomscrolling and the dominance of online news.
It’s just I went to one of the victim’s funerals. I’ll never feel nostalgic for those days as a result.
From my experience, it’s always been the other way around. There usually were small smoking sections partitioned away from the rest of the restaurant. This was the norm. And it was usually a fraction of the tables compared to the non-smoking sections.
Source: Worked as a server through most of the 80’s-90’s.
Non smoking section with like an 18 inch wall separating it from the smoking section. My mom almost got into a fistfight at a couple of restaurants for seating us directly next to the smoking section instead of in the opposite corner with less secondhand smoke.
In most restaurants I saw there was no wall in between.
In most restaurants I saw there was no wall in between.
This was my experience as well. I can still see it today in some older restaurants that haven’t been renovated in years, where there’s an area of the dining room with a much higher ceiling.
I have never heard of this. And I’m a smoker and I was alive back then. (Though I was a kid.)
Does the higher ceiling go to the smoking section or the non-smoking section?
And it was usually next to the kitchen and the restrooms. Worst tables all around.
No one can win on this one.
Seat the smokers in back and “oh no, I have to sit next to the kitchen and restroom.”
Seat the smokers in front and “oh no, I have to walk through the smoking section to get to or from my seat, or go to the restroom.”
Or at least that’s how Denny’s was setup in our town.
I don’t know how it was in the U.S., but where I’m from it was like 10% of the seats only, so even if they put it all on good seats, there would still be plenty of good seats for smokers.
As a child of the 70s/80s, although I don’t remember a great deal of the 70s, your parents had no idea where you were until you came home when the streetlights went on, unless you happened to call from a friend’s house to ask if you could sleep over. I remember my friend getting run over by a car which broke her leg because there was no crossing guard on the busy street where the kids had to cross to go to school, and after that they hired one. I lived up the street from the school, and had a cat that went outside, on hot days the front doors were always open and sometimes she’d go nap in the library or show up in my classroom. Then the neighbour who hates animals and had lost his teaching job for exposing himself to students abducted her and dumped her way across town, but someone found her and put an ad in the list and found section of the paper so I got her back.
That poor cat went through so much.
She was happy as can be and loved visiting.
Little kids playing with real fireworks.
In the early 2000s as teenagers we’d go play in the town with bags of fireworks on new year lmao
My neighbour smokes indoors. When she opens the door, I get the smell you are talking about.
My aunt smoked two packs a day, in the house, and when I visited I had to wear clothes I was ready to throw away, had to strip and shower when I got home, and once in the space of an hour she smoked seven cigarettes and finally one of my eyes swelled shut, and she demanded to know why I didn’t say anything. My husband pointed out the walls were yellow with tobacco, she lived in the house she grew up in and all the furniture was the same as when she was a child. When she died it all had to be junked, despite some of it probably being antique.
When she died it all had to be junked
The tar might have helped it burn better
I have a old friend from school times and both of his parents smoked heavily making his freshly washed clothes smell like ashes. Every time he opened his sports bag in the changing rooms I could feel the smell meters away. Fortunately he never developed a smoking habit.
Yes, that was super normal. I actually broke up with a guy because I couldn’t stand to go to his house, because his father spent all night smoking in a chair in front of the TV, and his mother spent the night drinking a whole box of Chardonnay over ice, smoking endlessly, and calling every single person she knew on the planet all night long until she was hiccuping drunk and the father had to put her to bed. It never would have gone anywhere so it didn’t matter but it was just disgusting. Then in the late 90s my mother took up smoking again after quitting for several years and insisted on doing it in the house, and it made me sick time and again.
My mother still does the recreational phone call thing and I seriously don’t fucking get it. Are the people she is calling endlessly just too polite to tell her to chill out? For decades on end?
Maybe they’re the same way as her?
I would sometimes sit in the next room and listen to her, and she was in the very old saying “threshing old straw”, going over fights and arguments and insults and such she had had years before. Like clearly what she needed was therapy.
Imagine being cock blocked by your Dad’s smoking habit. Tough break. Thanks Dad.
Jokes on you. You also didn’t know how bad everyone smelled because you smelled just like them.
It’s totally true, we all smelled terrible.
I still do!
clubbing became pretty smelly after the smoking bans i think it forced most decent clubs to upgrade their AC
Once in a great while, I have a brain fart and tell the restaurant host “two for non”.
That’s hilarious. Do they stare at you blankly?
Yup!
i’m old enough to remember smoking sections on airplanes. Not to be dramatic but, I felt like I was going to die!
Wow that looks awful
It was absolutely disgusting. I only flew once as a kid prior to it being outlawed but I was sick from it.
Even as a smoker I hated indoor smoking.
Even as a kid I always liked the smell
And the cold tobacco doesn’t bother me either
However there’s one tobacco smell I don’t like, when someone smoked a cigaret (in cold weather) very fast before boarding the train/bus. It’s a very strong, musky smell
I grew up in a house with smokers, picked it up as a teenager and smoked a pack a day for 20 years after that. Now I can smell someone lighting up 2 blocks away.
It’s kind of crazy. As time passed without smoking, I noticed many things smelled differently to me. For example, I was repulsed by the smell of cheddar cheese the first time I smelled it after quitting. I can’t put it into words properly but it smelled so different from what I was expecting that the thought of taking a bite made my stomach turn.
That’s interesting! My uninformed guess: since smoke is such a powerful smell, smoking constantly probably suppresses one‘s ability to smell other things - so after 20 years you’re probably accustomed to things smelling less strong and more smokey than they actually do. So I can see why smelling something very strong like cheese with your full sense of smell restored would be quite a shock!
This was my experience too. Now I can’t stand the smell of cigarrettes at all.
I wish I couldn’t stand the smell. It’s been a few years now but I still get regular cravings.
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At one of my first jobs in an office, everyone had an ashtray at their desk and there was always someone smoking at any given time throughout the day. Same with the breakroom. Sometime around then was when they started making people go to the breakroom to smoke, then a few years later it moved to having to go outside, which just meant walking through the cloud of smoke surrounding the door to get inside. Well, at least one thing has changed for the better since then. 😄
Altria, formerly Philip Morris, still allows smoking in their buildings as of a few years ago. It’s trippy to book a non-smoking room in the 2020s.
You can also just take a trip to the Waffle House off I-95 in Florence, SC. It allowed smoking when I was there in 2014 and probably still does.
There’s a small city in the Kansas City, Missouri metro (Raytown) that lobbied to keep it legal in restaurants and bars. I just looked it up, and apparently it’s fine to smoke weed as of 2023, too
As if there weren’t already enough reasons to avoid Missouri.
Well they literally get killed for asking.
Grew up in Asia. The less fancy one. Used to go buy my Dad cigarettes from across the street and toss out the filters when I was like 8 lol.
*He’s been smoke free for over 22 years. The amount of disinformation from Big tobacco, at least where I grew up, was insane. He is a very educated man and still… Cigarette was a status symbol, symbol of sophistication, when he was growing up.
