Originally published at: See inside a fully-stocked general store that hasn't been touched since 1963 | Boing Boing
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That reminds me of cleaning out the basement of my wife’s family home in Akron, Ohio in around 1997 after the deaths of her two aunts.
We found frozen fish and game in 4 chest freezers that were labeled as far back as 1969. In the shelves there were cans that had rusted through and most of the contents evaporated and jars that had exploded through their lids to coat the underside of the shelves above.
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This is the kind of place that should be cataloged and studied by anthropologists, photos taken, and scanned so that it can be rebuilt digitally for anybody to see.
Part of me thinks it should become a museum or get funding for preservation, especially now that it is known that it exists. Now that people know that it exists, it could get looted. Perhaps it should be taken apart, moved to some indoor location, but there it could be damaged or parted out for other exhibits.
Regardless, it is the kind of thing that I’t like to be able to take a virtual tour of.
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They accidentally created a museum.
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Just wait till the super mutants show up, and you cant fast travel because you’re over-encumbered
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Gosh, that’s awesome.
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How is it so clean?! The corners of the desk I’m sitting at have more dust than those shelves.
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“Well ain’t this place just a geographic oddity? 58 years from everywhere!”
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Surely Prince Albert has suffocated by now.
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If one were wondering - gosh - how would we package things with no plastic? Look here and see how we used to. I haven’t had a chance to watch yet, but I am guessing more tins, glass, and cardboard.
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My grandparents had briefly operated a gift shop in a seaside town at some point in the sixties, and there was a garage full of leftover stock gathering dust when I was a kid. It was neat, not because the various knicks-knack were anything special, but because it preserved all the stuff that wasn’t worth preserving, like price tags, and packaging, and even cardboard boxes were slightly different in the sixties.
Having it all preserved in the original context like this would be even trippier.
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'63 was a “no plastic” era? (well “part of the no plastic era”)
Looking at things in the picture I sure don’t see much plastic, so it looks like you are right (or maybe the back cat hands are plastic, and it looks like there are push taps on that shelf, and my mind says “plastic” but I can’t see any details…but even if they have some plastic, you sure are right, we use a ton of plastic things that previously were not plastic).
I know plastic is “cheaper” then glass, and maybe tin. Not cheaper then cardboard & probably not cheaper then glass if you include recycling costs (which for plastic is really just “haul it to another country and then pretend it gets recycled”). I wonder if we could somehow de-externalize recycling/disposal costs for those things how much less plastic we would have.
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IIRC oils costs were higher then, and so were plastic prices, and the newer plastics were not invented yet. But also, I believe at the time plastic was seen as cheap. If you had something in a tin or something in plastic, the perception of what was a better brand would have been the nice tin.
But due to the fact we can’t recycle plastic like we were told we could, then it makes some sense to start looking at changing packaging back to non plastic containers. Some stuff still make some sense to remain as plastic, but others not. Glass jars certainly could make a comeback, and with deposits on them, they would be brought back to grocery stores for re-use. There is this Shattoo Milk company that does that here with their bottles.
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No, there are breather holes, I saw em.
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My fiancee and I moved into an apartment once where the man passed away and had lived in the house since returning from WWII. The place looked straight out of the 60’s There was a shady-ish back room in the basement and the new owners said he would eventually be by to clear it out. I told him not to worry since it was just a few boxes. He said to keep what we found.
Ball jars of what smelled like port, bins of screws and other hardware, a few hand tools, and an entire box of 60’s playboys hidden below everything! My fiancee was fascinated by how different they were from today’s. There really were articles, and the ladies had much more hair and natural curves.
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I call shenanigans. While this appears to be an old store with an excellent array of cool old stuff, this has been maintained. Chocolates would be destroyed by bugs and rodents. There is no dust or tarnish on the metal bits. Just after they show the toys, you get a glimpse of a modern circuit breaker box and switch on the wall. A couple of manuals were in plastic sleeves to protect them. Nice collection, yes. Untouched since 1963? Nope! Not a chance.
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Maybe you’re wrong, or maybe you’re right. We’ll never know for sure.
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Canned goods? I betcha there’s a lot more botulism spores there now than when it closed.
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Absolutely. No possible way in the world that place looks like that after being untouched for almost 60 years.
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