There are some things we used to count as regular purchases that have basically vanished from our shopping lists.
Not because they don’t exist anymore—but because life moved on, tech got better, or we just… forgot they were a thing. Some of these items will make you laugh, some might hit you with a wave of nostalgia, and some will have you wondering why we ever needed them at all. Here are 13 things you probably haven’t bought in years—but once upon a time, they were oddly essential.
Blank CDs
There was a time when burning a CD was a whole event. You’d make the perfect playlist, scribble the title on the disc with a Sharpie, and hand it to someone like it was a treasured mixtape of your soul. Now, most laptops don’t even come with CD drives. Streaming has wiped the need for blank discs completely—and yet, there’s something kind of romantic about a badly labelled “ROAD TRIP 2007” CD still living in someone’s glovebox.
Tippex (or any correction fluid)
Remember the smell? The clumpy brush? The little white strip of shame across your notebook? Tippex was a must-have in school pencil cases, always ready to cover up your messy handwriting or a panicked answer on a test. Now, with autocorrect and digital everything, there’s not much need for white paint in a bottle. Still, there was something satisfying about peeling it off in one go when it dried just right.
Phone charms
If your Nokia didn’t have a sparkly dangling accessory clipped to it, were you even living? Phone charms were the height of personalisation—tiny rubber animals, beads that spelled your name, or something glow-in-the-dark if you were cool. Now our phones are sleek, charmless, and protected by sensible cases. It’s all a bit grown-up. But we kind of miss the days when your phone doubled as a personality piece dangling from your belt loop.
Photo albums
Not the fancy scrapbook-style ones, but those plastic-pocket albums from Argos where you’d shove your 6×4s from Boots after a family holiday. Every page stuck together slightly and smelled like glue, but those albums were a household staple. These days, most of our photos sit quietly in a cloud folder, never to be printed. The joy of flipping through blurry snaps of people with red eyes and questionable hair is a bit lost in the age of filters and FaceTune.
Chewing gum in a little cardboard sleeve
You know the one—Wrigley’s Extra, 10 sticks in a row, with that thin foil you’d always accidentally tear in half. It lived in school blazers and the bottom of every bag you owned. Now we buy gum in tubs or pop a mint instead. But those tiny sleeves? They were currency in the classroom, especially if you had the good flavours. Peppermint gum was basically social capital.
Disposable cameras
There was something magical about not knowing what you’d actually captured until your film was developed. You’d wait a week, pay for the prints, and discover that half were blurry, someone blinked, or you’d taken three pictures of your thumb. Disposable cameras were everywhere—on holidays, at school discos, even weddings. Now, digital photography has made them mostly obsolete… unless you’re into retro aesthetics and irony.
Ringtone downloads
At one point, buying a ringtone was a legit weekly decision. Would you go with Crazy Frog? The Nokia tune remix? That 10-second clip of Usher’s “Yeah”? All for 99p of your parents’ phone credit. Nowadays, most people keep their phones on silent and barely even notice if someone calls. We’ve come full circle—from customising every bleep to pretending our phone doesn’t exist.
Paper maps
Folding them was a nightmare. Reading them in the dark was worse. But there was a certain thrill in navigating a road trip with a crumpled A-Z in your lap, yelling, “I SAID TAKE THE NEXT LEFT!” Now we’ve got sat navs, Google Maps, and apps that reroute us before we even realise we’re lost. Convenient, yes—but slightly less fun for the backseat navigator shouting directions in all caps.
Floppy disks
If you were born before the year 2000, there’s a good chance you handed in at least one school project on a floppy disk. And no one questioned how that tiny plastic square held an entire Word document. They’re completely useless now, but for some reason, the “save” icon still looks like one. A relic of tech past, and maybe the most confusing object to explain to anyone under 18.
Magazine subscriptions by post
Getting a magazine in the mail felt like Christmas. You’d tear off the plastic wrap and dive into the glossy pages—whether it was Smash Hits, Kerrang!, Heat, or a niche hobby mag your mum picked out. While print magazines still exist, most of us scroll articles online and forget to renew any subscriptions. But flipping through pages in the bath with a cup of tea? That was peak unwinding.
Sticker books
Whether it was Premier League, Pokémon, or something glittery from WHSmith, sticker books were a full-blown obsession. The trades, the duplicates, the heartbreak of sticking one in slightly crooked—it was serious business. You might not have touched one in decades, but seeing a kid with a half-full sticker album can still unlock a deep, primal memory of playground negotiations and missing holographics.
Phone top-up cards
Nothing screamed “pay as you go” like walking into a corner shop and asking for a £10 top-up card, then scratching the code off with a coin. It was the teenage version of feeling like a grown-up. Now with contracts and auto-renewing everything, the top-up card is basically extinct. But there was a time when that scratchy little rectangle was your lifeline to texting 30 people at once, and a bit of flirtation over MSN after school.
