encyclopedia salesperson
Travel Agents. I remember growing up they were all over the place and people had to go to them to book flights and hotels or buy package holidays.
They’re all but gone now. I’m vaguely aware there may still be some specialist ones left catering to elderly boomers?
Its an entire business and career path thats completely gone, replaced by websites and at a push generic call centres (some people still book over the phone I guess?)
Here in Japan, travel agents are still around. The brick and mortar ones have actually branched out to offer their services online, too.
I assume they mostly survive on people who want to book a package tour, which are insanely popular here.
Some of them will now charge a consultation fee whether you buy something or not, so you can see how the industry is hurting.
Although I’m not a boomer, I did use one last year as they are great for just showing you all the options in a very clear way. With just an hour to spare to book a family trip, it was the way to go (for me at least).
I do think that next time I will use them to consult, but then book online to avoid their fee. Also, it seems that booking though the agent makes the ticket less flexible (the airline will lock out some parts of their website and tell you to have the agent do the thing which you wanted to)
So, yeah, it’ll be just like shopping. Go to the store to look and get info, then buy online to save money.
Village idiot
The thing a lot of people fail to understand about many technologies is that they don’t always eliminate ALL of something.
The internet didn’t eliminate all of almost any job, but it significantly reduced the number of people working in many jobs.
Significant impacts reductions have been felt in:
- Mail delivery
- Retail workers
- Newspapers
- Landline Telephone Services
- Photograph printing
- Encyclopedias
- Movie theaters
- Video Game Arcades
and more
Carrier pigeon.
There was a river rafting company not too far from where I live that switched to carrier pigeons to deliver SD cards to home base.
They had photographers stationed at a few points down river taking pictures of the clients, after each group had passed they put the SD card on one pigeon and it flew straight to base. By the time the clients were back to base the pictures were already printed and no one had to hurry back or rely on having good enough signal.
I hope they used rfc1149.
Comments like this make asking these questions so worth it. That’s such a cool thing to know is happening somewhere!
The original UDP
Postal workers have takes a significant cut with the popularisation of email.
From speaking to a career USPS worker…
Ages ago you’d start your day and spend 4-6 hours sorting buckets of envelopes and packages. Then organizing them in smaller batches by block/street. Then 2~4 hours running your route.
Now they have machines do pretty much all the sorting. But you still got a 8 hour shift. So it’s 7+ hours of walking instead of the old 2~4. It’s extremely physically demanding since you now have to deliver four times the mail due to the automation of part of your job.
