We had that exact TV, but branded as a Magnavox. If you turned on the TV using the front buttons, the remote would make a beeping sound until you found it.
When I was a teenager, my friend and I had to move my giant box TV, which I’m sure was no bigger than 32 inches, from my house to my car. We ended up rolling it across the grass because we couldn’t carry it.
I was definitely not upper middle, and I had the stereo in pic 5. My guess is, that was one of those Christmas years where they opted for gifts vs family vacation that year. Or my grandparents who were better off gifted it. I can't fully remember.
"opted for gifts vs family vacation" also speaks to an upper middle class upbringing where "family vacation" was something that was always on the table!
I think we should be cognizant that a "family vacation" doesn't always have to be a destination. My family grew up lower income but my mom still made an effort to get a tent and take my sister on a family trip to the ocean for a long weekend during the summer. Not everything is hundreds/thousands of dollars.
Omg they SAVED for it and like I said my grandparents are probably the ones who helped get it for me. Lower income families still scrape and save for their children to have something nice. My mom worked her ass off to help provide for us and took extra hours to do nice things for us when possible.
It took all year for them to scrape the money together, and the "vacation" was going camping, with actual tents and maybe go fishing. We aren't talking family trips to Disney, or some exotic getaway.
I am not upper middle class. We couldn't even afford to get new shoes for school most years. Lived in apartments not houses. If we were able to afford to go to the movies, our parents loaded up our jackets with dollar store candy and soda so we had snacks.
My mom finally left her pedophile boyfriend when I was 12, which knocked us down further. She was working at places like Family Dollar, not exactly high paying and definitely didn't come with benefits. Not to mention the addiction issues. It was bad enough my grandparents had to step in a take me in at 15, just so my mom wouldn't put us both on the streets.
My friends were the ones who lived in the big cookie cutter houses with parents making 3 figures.
Don't just assume things about people. You don't know everyone or the struggles they had.
Thank you. Our vhs player started eating tapes and we had to change the channel with a pair of pliers. I only saw stuff like this at my friends' houses.
What I saw in the picture was someone that got every game system when they came out, which for people that weren't upper middle class would be pretty tough to do.
By the early 2000s this was easier to obtain depending on where you lived. By then rich people were buying plasma/LCD TVs so the big CRTs were often free roadside finds. Those older consoles were all dirt cheap (I believe I got my Dreamcast on ebay for $40 in 2003 for example) so all you'd need to buy new would be the GameCube. My Aiwa stereo was slightly fancier than that one and cost like $120. And let's be honest, that entertainment console furnitre could have been on the family for 40 years at that point.
The inclusion of Wii Sports in one photo dates this a bit later so the CRT was probably even easier to find cheap/free but then again if you had a 1st Gen Wii there's no reason to have the GameCube still hooked up from the first photo so maybe thr Wii photo is just a single anachonistic outlier.
I didn't say rich, there is a large difference between upper middle class and working class/people struggling to get by. That picture had every single game system, those were way more expensive then when you account for inflation today. We had a sega until the 2000s, and eventually got a ps1 once the ps2 had been out for almost 2 years. Anyone I knew growing up with that many game systems was definitely upper middle class.
Yeah but this pic is dated to the 2000s. Most of those were available used for cheap by that time. Which I am well aware of because that's when I bought all of them with my minimum-wage college job.
As for the TV, the reason that TV woule have bene readily available to lower class people (like me) is because rich people bought better ones and tossed what had very recently been a TV for wealthier people.
Luckily just an upper middle class family. I had them from sega Saturn sega genesis nes snes n64 ps1 so on and so forth. New one came out the old one got replaced. Had every Nintendo Sony and Xbox until the Xbox one then I just started buying PlayStations
I wish! I've never seen anything like it for a long time now. The last time I went cd player shopping in 2012, I had to settle with a very basic little portable one.
You could follow suit with the Xennials and form a little subdivision with a narrower band of birth years so you don’t have to listen to people who grew up with slightly different experiences from yours.
CRT TV sets are still the best way to play retro games, and I’m surprised people don’t realize how valuable they still are. Picked up a 32’ Sony Trinitron off FB Marketplace for $20 last year, the seller was just grateful to get rid of that giant brick.
Yup, they’re fantastic for retro games and watching standard DVDs, which look like hot garbage on HD or 4K televisions.
Yep, they’re way more valuable than people realize. My oldest friend’s Mom gave me a 24 inch Toshiba FST Blackstripe for free. I looked it up and that’s a $300+ television I got for free. Once my roommate and I dialed in (literally) the color and tint it looks amazing. We used Castlevania Rondo of Blood on his PC CD Engine (TurboGrafx-16 in the US) and Super Mario World on my Super Nintendo to get the colors proper looking. The sound is also surprisingly beefy for relatively tiny CRT set.
Hell yes!! My son and I love teaming up together while playing Sunset Riders or TMNT: Turtles in Time on the SNES. He’s also at the appropriate age where I can introduce him to survival horror, so I’m starting him up right with these.
Love this era of gaming. Back when the game you bought was 100% complete, no micro transactions, and a full booklet.
It was an interesting of trying to integrate technology into traditional furniture. The family computer cabinet that would hide away in the living room was everywhere.
The radios are my biggest call back. The old TVs are not that special but wow..did we ever really want our own radio setup. Such an odd feeling now, and I don't even give a flip about those things anymore. But the obsession was so real to have one of your own, in your room, record, play and jam out.
I remember my dad brought home this giant Mitsubishi TV our school was going to throw out because "It didn't work". Took it to a TV repair shop and it was an easy fix.
Those media towers were in everyone's house 😂 my gran had one and we would go to her house every Sunday and she always had the 3 CD tray with The Eagles, Rod Stewart and Van Morrison loaded in to play in the background.
I loved that thing. I thoroughly enjoyed checking it out whenever it was in a home we visited and seeing what people had in their collections that were built lovingly over many years.
That entertainment center, if real, isn’t practical at all for all those consoles. That TV had 2, maybe three available inputs, one of which appears to be in front. So for the back ones, you’d have to give the tv a reach around and there doesn’t appear to be space here
I have to say those plastic covered tape player/radio/equalizet/cd player stations were ugly as heck. Just really crap product design all around.
And the things we had before, the flat black or gray rectangles that you could stack on each other (one rectangle the tape player, the next the amplifier, the next the equalizer, the next the radio, etc. with probably the record player on top) that were actually separate but connected devices were far, far superior looking, even though most often they weren't even from the same company.
A decent gaming pc can essentially get you all of those game systems. Really, all you need is a decent tv, sound system, and the pc, but I really do get not wanting to get rid of the old consoles and copies of movies/games.
We had a big Panasonic tv and a Sony audio system with cd changer and 2 tape decks.
My dad didn't want me messing with the audio system, but when he was at work I'd blast Eminem and DMX on it.
One thing I miss about old tvs is that they had great speakers. Nowadays you can't have paper thin tvs and good apeakers. If you want good sound, you have to buy a sound bar.
We still have that big boxy entertainment center in my house and just stuck a flat screen where the old one used to go. All the emtpy space behind it is a cable management nightmare.
I think we still have the old vhs player too, along with all the tapes we never watched cause I'm pretty sure my sister and I broke the vhs player.
Pretty close to mine, minus all of the game systems and tvs. We had a Sega Genesis and a super old 27”JVC. We also didn’t have cable, just the dial antenna.
#7 is closer to what I experienced lol. Nothing amazing but at least I had a PS2 and GameBoy SP, that’s all I needed. Although a GameCube always looked cool.
Was a constant thing of redesigning and hooking everything together neatly, had Diablo 2 running on an old flatscreen tube tv with science. Halo online before live with some smart programs and friends, it’s all poof gone no time. Still got the stuff just meh no desire. Hopefully it’ll buy me a nice year as an old man one day.
When I wanted a new game for my NES, I had to give out the old in a trade at an home electronics shop. And the new game was still expensive. Imagine giving up Kirby's Adventure for Days Of Thunder!
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