Oh good, reminiscing time! And this time it’s a few things I’m sorely missing in 2025. It’s been a while since I’ve waxed lyrical on a topic like this!
Then to keep things completely fair and above board, I’m also listing 7 things I’m not missing in 2025 including one social media that came with a bit of stress when it came time to parade the people you knew..
Like Jon Stevens from Noiseworks sang at the recent Red Hot Summer Tour here in Albury last month – Take me back!
Things I’m missing in 2025
-$2 lattes at street cafes. Okay yes, I have mentioned this a couple of times before. But the memories always pop in my head when I order a pretty bland and lacklustre coffee in 2025 and it sets me back about $6.50. And that’s just by it’s lonesome without a slice of devilishly dark chocolate cake in sight.
Okay so the coffee back in the 90’s for a $2 coin was tiny and the slice wasn’t big…but it was coffee and cake while you sat on a fold out chair for a crisp (or not so crisp) $5 note. How could you beat that?
-Twenty dollars in the fuel tank getting you through a couple of weeks. No it’s not the fuel economy missing in 2025, on a good run my Mazda 6 can almost be as frugal as my wife’s Lancer. No it’s the price of fuel hanging around at the higher end of between a dollar fifty and two dollars that make 20 bucks enough to get you down the road. Provided you don’t put your foot down in a hurry.
-Garage sales. Pre-covid you could easily spend a weekend morning trawling the neighbourhood for bargains. A $5 bread maker here, a $10 coffee table there, a computer full of spares for less than a cup of coffee. Nowadays (and possibly thanks to Facebook marketplace and Gumtree) the weekends of vast garage sales have gone missing in 2025. So much so that the last time I checked one out, the owner was so happy someone showed up, she slashed the price of all of her birdcages right there on the spot.
And I don’t even own a bird!
To make things worse, if you find one then you have those resellers who seem to ransack the good stuff and sell it off higher online descending on things first which means by the time you get there, it’s just junk remaining.
And lots of birdcages.
-Factory outlet stores. A little broken stitch here, a tiny tear there and suddenly a $50 t-shirt is far more affordable at $10. Or a nice jacket you could never afford usually down to $20. I used to have heaps where I grew up in Richmond ($100 on Swan Street would buy you just about a complete wardrobe some days) only to watch them slowly fade away until there were just a couple of stores remaining. They were worth the drive obviously if you loved saving on clothes but today I’m living in a town that doesn’t have one. For shame – given the cost of living, I feel one would do well here!
-Tiny little independent bakeries. I’m harping back to the times in the 2000s were $2 could buy you a salad roll and a hearty pie was less than five dollars. Now everything I come across is part of a chain and priced accordingly.
Honestly, a foccacia should not set me back $12. Boo-urns.
-Physical media. I know, I know, this is a strange thing to be missing in 2025 given the love of clouds and digital downloads but hear me out. As I kid I grew up with solid cartridges to thunk into my Sega Master System. My first PC and Macintosh classic worked their way through a lot of 3 and a half inch floppies and later when the technology caught up, CD’s. I had tapes, I had CD’s, I even had a minidisc for music (for uni) at one stage.
Directly to my right as I type this is a Blu-Ray drive for my computer….which doesn’t really have a space for it. So if I need to use it, I have to remove the glass panel and trail a couple of wires to the unit seated next to it. It stands out like dog’s dangles but that’s how I get it to work.
I was a child of physical media and I’m still not over it dammit. Give me back my zip drives, spools and pile of slightly scratched burnt CDs (and going to op shops and buying someone else’s pile of slightly scratched burnt CDs just to see what treasures – or horrors – you could find.)
-And off the last one, computer markets! Are they still a thing or have they gone missing in 2025? The last one I remember in existence was the Camberwell Computer market where they sold games (with real physical media!) and spare parts, DVD’s and all sorts of goodies. There was even a guy seated in the corner with a bare bones open system ready to test your parts for a gold coin donation.
Again now we have Facebook marketplace and Steam. And it’s just not the same. Give me the crowds of PC boffins enjoying their perusing and those games I’ve never heard of at rock bottom prices.
And then 7 things I’m not missing in 2025
-Wickedly expensive share brokerage. Yes the thing that inspired this post and that I’m happy to see the back of (although I haven’t seen it for a very long time now) was once having to fork out $24.95 to Westpac Brokering to buy a block of shares and $24.95 to sell that block of shares when I finally got tired of it going nowhere (and I needed the cash). And when I say block of shares, I’m meaning the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) not allowing you to buy Australian shares unless they were packaged together to exceed $500.
Which meant if I wanted to own a slice of Company X then I’d have to buy at least $500 worth and then tack on another $24.95 for the privilege. When it came to sell it, that’d be another $24.95. Now obviously the more you bought in the interim would make things less of a sting in the selling stage profit wise but this was me we’re talking here and it’d take me forever just to get to $500 in the first place.
No wonder I only ever bought three blocks in my life.
For the record, Westpac brokering now charges only $4.95 per trade which is far more reasonable. Personally though I’m buying shares through Superhero ($2 a trade) or Sharsies (1.9% per trade) depending on which one works better in my favour come buying time.
-Having the stress deciding on which friends made the cut for the top 12 on your Myspace friends list. Apparently the place still exists although I couldn’t tell you who has a Myspace account or anyone who actually wishes it didn’t go missing in 2025..
-The absolute barrage of almost inescapable news. I’m now more up to date about that idiot president than I ever cared to be whether I want to hear about him or not (for the record, I do not.) I get news in my feed, on my phone, at work (in radio), on the TV, down the street, everywhere. Hourly news I wish would go missing in 2025 so I can half a far more enjoyable existence.
No wonder digital detox is such a thing nowadays.
-A trip to the shops now requiring a home loan. Seriously if I knew the price of everything would get this eye-wateringly bad, I would have invested in a series of chest freezers and gone heavy on the meat shopping months ago. Once upon a time $20 would get you all the essentials including milk, bread and some kind of meat cut for dinner. Now take double that amount and hope you can find something heavily discounted.
(Just on that, who is actually buying those hugely oversized and very expensive tomahawk steaks at Woolworths? Someone must do as they keep selling them at my local one. If you’re rolling in that much coin to blow, could I please have some? Thanks in advance.
I know I echo the sentiments of the weekly shopping community where I wish both price gouging and skyrocketing prices would both go missing in 2025..
-Any potential pay rise being swallowed by inflation. Thanks for the boost up, but could I just ask for a slightly larger boost up on account of falling backwards even though I’m making the most money I ever have? Sigh, moving on.
-And finally stupidly high house prices. Great for people selling, not for one buying. Guess which camp I fall in? Ha ha just tricking – I can’t save for a house! What doesn’t help is rising rents and the point above. And I’d like to tell you both this page and my YouTube channel are funnelling great wads of cash daily into my back account…but that ideas also seems to have gone missing in 2025.
Right so that’s me, what do you miss and what don’t you miss in 2025? Let me know below!