Growing Up in the 90s: What We Did Before Phones

The 7-Eleven Slurpee refill scam needs to be discussed. An entire generation of children figured out you could buy one Slurpee and then refill it indefinitely because nobody was watching and the store clerk didn’t care. That was our lifehack. That was our side hustle. These 90s nostalgia moments keep reminding me that we ran a small gray-market economy out of every convenience store in North America and got away with it completely.

Then the stick-based grass maintenance. A tweet casually mentions “whacking grass with a stick” as a regular activity and the replies are flooded with people going “oh yeah, I did that for hours.” Somebody else mentions playing on railways. Somebody else mentions rhubarb theft as a normalized summer activity. The 90s childhood memories are essentially a list of behaviors that would get you arrested today and were just considered Tuesday at the time.

The Swatch phone with the fifty-foot cord. I can feel the weight of that phone in my hand right now. Stretching the cord across the hallway into the bathroom so you could whisper to a crush in semi-private. These millennial nostalgia posts aren’t just memories, they’re muscle memory, they’re in the body. You read “called up a girl I liked on the telephone” and your stomach does a small butterfly flip because you remember the exact way a rotary dial felt.

Yelling “CAR!” in the middle of a cul-de-sac hockey game might be the most important vocabulary word of our generation. You stepped aside. The car passed. You stepped back on. The game continued. Nobody wrote anything down. Nobody filed a permit. Twelve kids had a functioning traffic management system and it was one guy yelling a single word.

The 1990s childhood wasn’t better, exactly. It was less supervised. Our parents had no idea where we were for six hours at a stretch, and we had no way to tell them, because the phone was attached to a wall and we were fourteen blocks away.

And we turned out mostly fine. We turned out with an encyclopedic knowledge of shampoo bottle ingredients, because that was the bathroom reading material, and a deep and abiding love of Bomberman, which absolutely did end friendships. The nostalgia is heavy because the era is gone. The landline cord stretched across three rooms is not coming back. Somebody let that Swatch phone ring one more time.