QUARTERS:
When trying to come up with stuff for Q, one of the first things that came to mind was quarters. Those who went to play games on machines always needed quarters. People often binged on these games, thus running out of quarters. (More on video games to come.)
Originally it coast a dime to use pay phones, but eventually the price was raised to a quarter. Even before then, there was a slot for quarters on the phones. When my mom and I drove up to visit my aunt in Idaho in the 1980s, we stopped at a motel in Nevada. It cost two dollars to make to call on a payphone--eight quarters. And jukeboxes suffered the dime-to-quarter inflation as well. Pay phones are largely forgotten of course, because of cell phones, but some jukeboxes remain with digital music. I've never bothered trying to use these, but I'm sure they are more than just a quarter. And the standing video games can be still found at pizza places. No doubt they're more than a quarter now, too.
QUIK:
You may know this now as Nesquik, but back in the day it was Quik, or Nestle Quik. Before the name change, the packages looked like this:
The lid was a pain to get off, often needing a rounded knife.
The animated bunny appeared in the commercials:
Q-TIPS:
I still use these, even they aren't the Q-Tips brand. Q-Tip is a trademarked term that many have mistaken for being a generic name. The same is true of names such as Kleenex (tissue) and Rollerblades (in-line skates), as well as with drug names like Prozac (the generic name is fluoxetine). But it's true that most people don't know, let alone care, about these details.
Many will remember the slogan used by Q-Tips:
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QUITTING time for now. More RETRO stuff on Friday.
5 comments:
In Canada we have one dollar coins (Loonies) and two dollar coins (Toonies) which can be used in machines requiring coin payments. Not too many of those around any more though, as you note. Parking meters are the only kind I still use regularly and quite frankly, parking is so expensive that it's easier just to use a credit card if you're paying for more than half an hour or so.
Pay phones went up from 10 cents to 20 cents, but it was too much trouble to carry two dimes, so we all kind of switched to quarters. But I was cheap, so I would put in two dimes.
No quarter here. We did have Quik though.
I remember the last time I needed a quarter for my payphone. I got locked out of my car at a grocery store. Keys, cell phone, and bag were on the floor in the backseat. I had one quarter in my pocket and managed to call my then-husband and caught him just as he was driving by the grocery store on his way to a friend's house out of town. Luckily, it was at a time when both cell phones and pay phones co-existed together.
We didn't have the video games when I was younger. There were pinball machines but I rarely played those. I was careful with my money when I was a kid. You could stretch it a long way, but there wasn't that much available to me for frivolities like games. But we had plenty of other things available to us.
Lee
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