Offered for your consideration is the artifact below, found amidst the remains of my wife’s disused (now rehabbed) bicycle:
To the best of her recollection, this is a plastic bag hanger. Its purpose is to allow easy transport of small purchases on a bicycle, by clipping the handles of the disposable plastic bags containing those purchases, to your bicycle.
The entertainment value of this object lies not in the object itself, but in trying to recall the world that created it.
You may not believe this …
Once upon a time, before the dawn of the internet era, the only practical way to watch a movie of your choosing, at home, was to own or rent a video cassette of that movie. A physical copy. No streaming.
This often involved a delightful trip to your local video rental store. There, you (and perhaps other members of your family) would peruse the racks of video offerings, until you found something you wanted to watch.
And then stand in line interminably, because your local video rental place had a monopoly on video rentals and acted accordingly. Odds were good that your local video rental monopoly was a Blockbuster Video, which had bought up and/or driven almost every other video renter out of the market. I distinctly recall an era when everyone hated their local Blockbuster, precisely because they extracted as much from the market as it would bear, and the customer didn’t seem to factor into the equation at all, beyond that.
Blockbuster made the transition from video cassettes to DVDs, but not for long. Newcomer Netflix ate into their market share by offering DVD rentals by mail. Netflix relied on speedy delivery by the U.S. Postal Service (/not S) to deliver and return rental DVDs, ordered by the customer over the internet. Those DVD arrived in a simple paper envelope — no packaging.
Netflix eventually morphed into the streaming giant it is today (no more mailed DVDs). Blockbuster finally went bankrupt. And the only national vestige of non-streaming movies on demand is Red Box kiosks, where you can rent a DVD from a vending machine.
I’m not sure why Blockbuster decided to produce the little giveaway that my wife had hanging from her bike. But note that this gizmo was made for bicycle enthusiasts who didn’t give a second though to bringing home a disposable plastic bag with every purchase. That’s just the way the world worked.
Epilogue
When I told my kids that the 12V power outlet in a car is properly called a cigarette lighter socket, they thought I was kidding. They found the idea that adults smoked everywhere — including in the car — incomprehensible. (And, in their defense, literal cigarette lighters (and ashtrays) were gone from new cars before they were born.)
In that context, this little doo-dad is a throwback to the pre-internet era that may not seem credible to people who didn’t live through it.
It was a lot less convenient to watch a movie in the privacy of your home, back then, compared to today.
But the flip side of that is that the U.S. population had a lot more popular culture touchstones than it does today. We all kind of watched at least some of the same stuff. Today, the only thing that comes to mind along those lines is the Superbowl, where a big chunk of America watches the same content, at the same time.
The era of fast, cheap internet made it a lot easier to watch a movie at home. But it has also given us the current intellectual uber-fragmentation of the population, in terms of the content that individuals consume. At its worst, it allows the crazies to live in their own crazy world, and never have to absorb what passes for mainstream thinking in American society. If such a mainstream still exists.
That’s a more somber ending than this cheap plastic piece o’ crap from Blockbuster deserves. But it’s a throwback to an era where the breakup of modern American society was a lot less imminent.
