When you had to go to places to get things

Old man nostalgia from the Ritter sport thread

This probably deserves its own thread and is going to very old mannish; but, I miss when you had to got to places to get special magical treats.

As a kid Ritter sport was the only good thing about going to visit my dad’s incredibly boring friend in Germany. It made the whole trip worthwhile.

Everything gets branded and sent round the world so quickly these days, it ruins some of the simpler pleasures of travel. As a kid one of the exciting things was either my dad coming back from travel with an exciting treat (Scandinavian airlines had very good Scandinavian confectionary selection boxes) or the anticipation of, say, going to France and being to have an orangutan for the first time in a year.

And of course orangina got corrected to orangutan so my child hood nostalgia will forever be recorded as a hope for friendly primates in the Massif Central.

that's funny you talk about candy... I was just thinking about this ridiculously old-fashioned candy shop that we didn't go to very often, but if I went to the doctor or something (like age 5-8), we'd stop there on the way home. They had a lot of glass jars with rootbeer sticks and shit like that... lots of stainless steel with a checkered floor, mirrors behind the counter... absolute magic

I think it's a yoga studio or some bullshit how

but yeah, old man nostalgia... 'back in my day!' very Grandpa Simpson

There was one store I knew of in NYC that sold Aero bars, which my wife loved, so I’d go there sometimes on the way home from work and pick her up a few.

I think it's possible to preserve this sense of wonder even in a world that moves too fast for your liking. For example if you are selective about ordering, choose to travel "slowly", tend to look for those regional items, or by consuming locally.

For sure. I’ve spent the day thinking about counterfactuals; to a certain extent this is a brand goods thing. If something is too generic then it doesn’t spread. The one I came up with is a stick of rock with the name running through it - something you only get at British seaside towns (AFAIK). It’s something you can make anywhere but because there’s no brand attached it just stays there.

Garratt’s popcorn from Chicago- which is just popcorn with caramel or cheese dust on it; ok I can’t get that in Australia but can in Singapore and Tokyo.

You can only really get real ale in uk as it doesn’t keep well enough to travel (plus the rest of the world thinks it’s disgusting lol) same with stuff like pulque or palm wine

I still remember being weirded out by the emerging phenom of uk supermarkets having a whole section dedicated to horrible imported US candy at insanely high prices

This feeling is very much alive and well in the USA with Trump's tariffs lol

When we were in France this summer I became totally hooked on these Seeberger nuts and trail mixes, they've not got a lot of added salt or sugar and there are some unusual ingredients like dried rhubarb and white mulberries. I dunno if things were any different before Trump, but the one place I found online that would ship globally wanted like 33€ for a 150g bag

The rest of the world finding out Hershey's tastes like puke must be some kind of breakthrough

Hard for me to generalise from Hull because there are bound to be more cosmopolitan parts of the UK but putting online purchase to one side it's not easy to get good Belgian beer and the general supply of regional cheese feels diminished to me

Very specialist bit - there was a brief moment when you could buy North Staffs specialty oatcakes in Sainsburys but that's passed and god forbid actually going to Stoke to pick some up

Slight variation, "when you had to go to more distant places to get things." I used to go to Atlanta to grocery shop at least once a year, sometimes twice. Now there are okay Asian and Latino grocery stores 30 minutes away in Tupelo that take away much of the reason I have to go on those trips, which I really love(d).

A colleague went on holiday to South Korea a few years ago and brought back a bunch of Korean snacks. Then literally a couple of weeks later an Oseyo opened in town. So immediately all these snacks went from "guess I'll never eat that again" to "I can buy this whenever I want".

initially thought this was going to be about ordering everything on amazon thus never having to set foot in a target again. well in case you're wondering it's a boon for the trailer-living set in the suburban u.s.

before getting a state medical marijuana card i was making trips across the burning desert for weed every few months or so. thanks to those trips i became acquainted with some real desert wilderness just outside wendover along with a very good taco truck.

i guess this thread is about world traveling though. from the back: wherever you go, there you are.

Things I can think of
- Stem ginger marmelade from London, closest I found here was a fancy ginger jam, not quite up there.
- "Kapenta" fish (Tanganyika sardines), really delicious with pap. For that matter: pap. You can find West African stuff here, Southern/central not so much.
- Avocados freshly plucked from the tree, ditto mangos.
- Olives from Nyons (in Provence). "President" butter.
- British or American family of desserts: velvet cakes, brownies. More generally their breakfast culture.
- Buchu tea. Espresso bars.
- Good quality t-shirts at a good price (for ex. Refinery in SA)
- Places with no light pollution to stargaze. And wild remote places.
-

Lots and lots of Scottish swedgers.

... and other foodstuffs.

Scottish tablet is impossible to get in the South East of England. And it turns out that Keiller's Butterscotch hasn't been made for decades.

I feel like I lived (surely others of you did, too) in the last moments of almost, like, "frontier" scarcity. I mean the years that everything had to be mail ordered. We got SO many catalogs. My mom had a whole cupboard for them, in case someone needed something for Christmas, she could get out the catalog and order it. Sales and stock-keeping and promotions moved at the pace of the USPS. Going somewhere that actually had those branded stores would have meant driving anywhere from 1 to 10 hours away.

And that was literally WEST MICHIGAN. Not truly remote, not, like, Denton, Montana (pop 205). Any little town of 3000, 5000 people would have a grocery store and a hardware store and 4 churches, and after that all the businesses would be privately owned and whatever the local economy would support.

Supermacs, despite their best effort to expand outside Ireland. Prob applies to anything I get when I’m home tbh, small country problems. I was actually in Camden yesterday and went to the London Irish centre where I’ve never gone before specifically to get some Polo biscuits or chocolate Kimberley biscuits and they didn’t have any. 👎🏻 prob have to go to Holloway Road or some North London supermarket for such delicacies (though I’ve never seen Polo biscuits outside Ireland besides LIC posting them on their social media before).

Lots of UK supermarkets now will sell random selections of various Japanese items and snacks which I do think is new and to be valued? Like being able to buy Kewpie pretty easily now is good if you’re someone who likes mayonnaise.

Tbh Kewpie is nice but sitting kn shelves next to some of the top tier Polish mayo has diminished it's rep imo

When I lived in Prague (2002-2006) it used to be impossible to get loads of stuff, even with a Tesco in the centre you couldn't find rice krispies or British-style sausages, but I enjoyed being forced to change. When I took trips back to the UK the thing people asked me to bring back was filters for cigarettes, no problem buying the tobacco or rolling papers, but for some reason nobody sold the filters. In China (2006-2016) the most annoying things to find were deodorant, shaving foam and razor blades.

I miss planning a trip to Vinyl Fever in Tallahassee when I was going to FSU. I was an 18 year old novice metalhead and they had a metal buyer named Sandra who stocked a lot of great stuff. I managed to buy Mayhem's "Dawn of the Black Hearts" bootleg, Malignancy's "Intrauterine Cannibalism", Celtic Frost's "To Mega Therion", and Opeth's "Still Life" (when it wasn't currently available in the US - she imported it!)

I had no car, so had to take the city bus and plan my return trip. It was always a pick me up.

Now I can hear all of those albums in minutes with mouseclicks. Taint the same.

Even acquiring digital music is too easy now! No more logging onto file sharing sites and risking endless Trojans

I feel like a lot of “the old days” was just being ignorant of the existence of consumer goods outside of what’s available or mass-marketed. If foreign foods were to show up at the local grocery store, people wouldn’t buy them because they would have no idea what they were! Now you can at least pull out your phone and google what something is and if it’s “a good brand”.

This was actually the major appeal of Grocery Outlet to my mom when I was younger. They had a lot of European imports that she knew were good and priced cheap. There’s still a fair bit of that there… I can get Aussie licorice at Grocery Outlet which I know is vastly superior to American licorice thanks to ilx.

You can only really get real ale in uk as it doesn’t keep well enough to travel (plus the rest of the world thinks it’s disgusting lol) same with stuff like pulque or palm wine

I still remember being weirded out by the emerging phenom of uk supermarkets having a whole section dedicated to horrible imported US candy at insanely high prices

― Tweenage Death Camp & Sux to My Ass-mar (wins), Saturday, October 3, 2026 10:48 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

My closest (2nd closest?) local brewery does a passable Sussex Bitter from time to time, it’s not Harvey’s but it’s good. Their Yorkshire bitter tastes exactly like Tetley’s; so not good but authentic.

If I could only get them to remove the sparkler from the hand pump when the Sussex was on so we didn’t have to have a creamy head, we’d be in business.

Despite most mr Kipling products being available here and being slightly stale from the voyage; and an ill fated attempt to start manufacturing here by leading off with fondant fancies; it is still impossible to get a battenberg cake here.

When I still drank bitter i used to enjoy a Tetleys. Coincidentally I was talking about the savagery of people who don't like a head on their pint to the landlady in the pub yesterday - headless pints are really off-putting to me.

I recognise this is a regional shibboleth.

a local pub here has a board up explaining that czech beer should have a head

As of September this year, if you want to sample the officially recognised world's best pizza you need to travel to Devonshire Road, Chiswick in London. Napoli on the Road overtook the New York-based reigning champion Una Pizza Napoletana.

A significant percentage of my life is spent shopping for foodstuffs. It's not uncommon for me to hit three stores in one day because I like the vegetables from one store, bread from another, and I need a meat or pantry item from a third. I've gotten slightly less fanatical about this lately because I've been busy but I hope to start traveling an hour for cheese again soon!

there are no good cheese shops in Hull, a constant source of mild heartbreak for me

idk maybe there are i'm pretty lazy and i don't drive

sort of tangential but when looking for these kinds of things i try to always be mindful of where the thing actually was made

for example i think asahi beer in the us is actually imported from italy where it's brewed under contract by peroni (asahi owns peroni i think?)

guinness in america is brewed by labatt iirc

i'd love to drink more english ales but i only seem to find samuel smith in the stores here

Like being able to buy Kewpie pretty easily now is good if you’re someone who likes mayonnaise.

― bruich, a stór (gyac), Saturday, October 3, 2026 12:40 PM (yesterday)

they've started making kewpie here in america too, but it's not as good as the japanese stuff. the japan bottle comes in a logo-less plastic squeeze bottle. the american stuff is labeled as seen in the below

https://preview.redd.it/kewpie-mayo-different-production-and-completely-different-v0-k63zui6sa8tc1.jpg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=355293d129f8eaaa69ed013f1fe19369637c8e98

do not get the american version, its very mid

English ales are best fresh from the cask, so the bottled/canned versions are always going to be sub-par anyway.

huh apparently the kewpie in the pic i posted was made in poland

https://www.kewpieshop.com/cdn/shop/files/KA_Mayo_KR_12oz_Main_20260604_TransparentBG_700x700.png?v=1780613776

this is the american version

Tbh Kewpie is nice but sitting kn shelves next to some of the top tier Polish mayo has diminished it's rep imo

― he composed genius songs and all the rest was a crap (Noodle Vague), Saturday, October 3, 2026 12:47 PM (yesterday)

now i'm wondering if you've bought the european version rather than the imported from japan version

https://kewpie-europe.com/products/

Like being able to buy Kewpie pretty easily now is good if you’re someone who likes mayonnaise.

― bruich, a stór (gyac), Saturday, October 3, 2026 12:40 PM (yesterday)

they've started making kewpie here in america too, but it's not as good as the japanese stuff. the japan bottle comes in a logo-less plastic squeeze bottle. the american stuff is labeled as seen in the below

🖼

do not get the american version, its very mid

I’ve only ever seen the one on the right

Like being able to buy Kewpie pretty easily now is good if you’re someone who likes mayonnaise.

― bruich, a stór (gyac), Saturday, October 3, 2026 12:40 PM (yesterday)

they've started making kewpie here in america too, but it's not as good as the japanese stuff. the japan bottle comes in a logo-less plastic squeeze bottle. the american stuff is labeled as seen in the below

🖼

do not get the american version, its very mid

I see now on Sainsbury’s they offer for general sale the one manufactured in Poland

https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/groceries/product/kewpie-mayonnaise-470g

But the only one I’ve ever bought is from their Japanese section and comes in the plastic wrap like the one on the right, so definitely more limited availability if your branch doesn’t have a JP section

yes that's the one! it's great and i've yet to meet a better mayo

yeah the Kewpie i've got now is Polish, probably explains why it's not as good as Winiary. gonna have to order next time.

Beer is one of the last refuges of this in the US due to weird distribution laws. Some beers I literally have to travel to drink.

Like in Wisconsin my first thought is "yay I can have Spotted Cow"

yeah Minnesota beer (the best beer) is impossible to find in the DMV. Was delighted to find Fair State in Virginia this summer.

My wife likes Kewpie mayonnaise, but she also likes honey mustard over brown mustard, so I don't trust her opinion.