Dollar Tree.
It used to have been an unreal experience witnessing the existence of these stores when they came out. Everything for a $1. No joke. The quality of some things have had corners cut and the quantity might’ve been laughable, but there was a good solid purpose for these stores.
And then I started seeing the signs after a few good solid years of shopping there. The first sign was how they stopped selling eggs. This was before the Bird Flu. They stopped selling eggs because they simply couldn’t afford to buy stock and then the price hike to $1.25 happened.
And now they’ve hiked the prices again to $1.50 for some products in a handful of stores. Additionally, they’ve incorporated items going from $2 ~ $15 so they have long lost the role and title of being the most affordable places to shop.
Gone were the days.
It was always bad.
Windows 3.1 was bad. It was ugly, it was slow. The Macs of that era looked better, although their multitasking was even worse than Windows, somehow. It was pretty clear that 3.1 was just a desktop GUI over a text OS.
Windows 95 and 98 were bad. They were graphical improvements over 3.1 / NT, but they were so brittle and janky. Remember bullshit like “TEXTFI~1.TXT”?
The latest versions are all terrible too. Like, try to make a change to a system setting and you get the Windows 10/11 themed settings menu. But, if you try to make any kind of advanced setting change and you’re taken over to a GUI that shows that under the hood it’s still effectively running Windows XP components.