If you were really advanced you might shop around a little bit, but most of the time you’d end up with the same price, so most of us didn’t bother.

Before it was really easy to shop around, you might make a couple of phone calls to get a handful of competing prices. But sellers were often not selling the exact same products and services, so you would have to do some calculations on the differences in order to make your choice.

That really only happened for higher-priced things, though. For everyday stuff, you would know who had it locally, go there, pay whatever they were asking, and take it home. The time and effort you had to spend in order to find exactly the right thing at exactly the right price wasn’t worth it for lower-priced things.