Before Internet shopping it took time to track things down and locate it including simple things like arts and crafts. What did your parents buy you where they went out of their way or spent a lot just to make you happy. Internet examples before the smartphone age are acceptable. I remember mine bought me a crafts set from Argos that cost £13. It was full of tat and it probably costs less 20 years later- bless them
What did you parents buy you where they had to go out of their way?
Back before taking vitamins was mainstream and they weren't available in shops other than Holland and Barrett (and probably unaffordable), my dad sourced vitamin C in 5kg jars from a mate in a research lab. He'd call up the guy and then meet near the back door in a dodgy London alleyway, and get the large brown glass jar handed over in a plastic bag...
Now they say megadoses of vit C don't actually protect you from all the colds and viruses, but bless dad for trying.
Why’d he need to meet in a dodgy alleyway
Presumably because you're not allowed to sell stuff your employer buys for use at work, whether that's vitamin C or something stronger
“What you in for”
“I was caught doing vitty c”
Also I'm not sure if Dad was paying anything for it! In which case it's just called theft, if anyone wanted to make a big deal of an annual loss of about £25 in today's money. Though it's pretty much expected that scientists nick boxes of gloves to use for DIY at home, people acquire stationery, etc.
Mum went everywhere to get me a Buzz Lightyear, couldn't find one, got me a mini-figure instead. I remember being really disappointed, and then 20 years later she told me how awful she felt and how hard she tried and I felt really bad for reacting the way I did!
Kids be kids. Don't worry about it - every parent was that kid once.
My dad was going to the USA in the very late 90s got me the Rembrandts album (L.P. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.P.\_(The\_Rembrandts\_album)) , as it wasn't available in the UK at the time. I had asked him to look for it.
So she didn't get it. But bloody well tried. I asked for owl pellets.
She trawled around every pet store in town before someone kindly told her what an owl pellet was, and that it wasn't pet food.
It's a funny story she tells now. She tells it better than I do.
I have always been and continue to be 'difficult to buy for' despite always telling people what I want. Amazon has resolved that in a big way. The 'weird shit' I like is typically avalable.
I was 7 when Pokemon came out in the UK and it quick became the biggest thing on and off the playground.
My parents would forever be going places on their lunch breaks buying me the latest Pokemon cards and games as they got released.
Due to high demand the shops in my town would sometimes sell out of everything Pokemon related so my parents would go to the next town over after work to try and find it there.
This went on for several years as new Pokemon came out alongside new games and cards featuring all the newly released Pokemon.
Looking back now as a adult they must have spent a absolute fortune on it all.
I played Pokemon Red that much when it first came out that the back of my Gameboy literally melted from overheating lol
Good times for me, probably not good times for my parents but i appreciate it way more now looking back as a adult than i probably did at the time.
Go and thank them now, they would really appreciate it, more than you know. 🙂
Queuing outside either Argos or Toys r Us from the very early hours of the morning to get a Power Rangers Megazord the Christmas they came out.
I’d just turned 4 and wrote a list to Father Christmas. It had the following:-
A-Team Van
Street Hawk bike
Knight Rider KITT car
And then on Christmas Eve I updated the list to include an Air Wolf Helicopter!
Didn’t occur to me until later in life the effort they’d gone to, to find them all, including an Air Wolf!
These were all small hand sized models, but I loved them!
When I was about 10 years old, on Christmas Eve my dad spent ages queuing for a new video game outside Toys R Us for me. It wasn't cheap. Next day when I opened the gift, it was for an entirely different console, he just bought the game and didn't bother to check what platform it was for. I felt so bad for him I tried to stay quiet and just thank him and it was very obvious when I just didn't open or play on it.
He ended up standing in the queue again for ages when it reopened to exchange it.
My mum said it took her an absolute age to find a game boy colour and pokemon yellow one Christmas but, bless her, she got it. I still have it 26 years later
My mum trawled the country for one of those buzzwire games I really really wanted. We travelled a lot with my dad's job and any holidays would be spent visiting family and friends so we did have the opportunity to check every argos known to man. She did it too! She eventually found it. I'm in my 30s and I still have it I'll never forget the effort she put in.
I also had (and still do have) horrific co-ordination so I think it was a game she thought would be quite beneficial for me 😂
Give her a hug and a poke 😆 Argos was so overpriced in hindsight but they did their best trying to buy us everything we circled
My dad must’ve gone into every toy shop in Surrey looking for a rabbit Keyper for me for Christmas in probably 1988ish. He found one though and I bloody loved it 😊
Not expensive but for my gcse design tech project I had to make a model of the garden I designed - my parents found all the obscure model shops to take me to to find all the bits I needed (no Hobbycraft) and then when they couldn’t find decent (cheap) fake earth got everyone in the family to save all their used teabags to dry out - my model garden smelt delightful!
Haha love it I remember my grandparents have always had glass bottles. I needed the tin caps for my drum I was making at school and they had all these random caps in the fridge I took away
This was in the US, but I collected comic (C-Men) trading cards and we had to go to a specific shop in some strip mall somewhere that was for trading card collectors.
When we moved here, I dragged them to boutique comic shops to buy issues because the only comics you could get generally were either Beano type which I had no interest in, or weird large format print version of stories that were six months old.
In the ‘80s it was a lot more difficult to source decent second hand goods, without Facebook or eBay etc. My parents weren’t well-off so when my sister and I needed new bikes we ended up in some random person’s…yard (?), looking at several pre-loved bikes they had for sale. Not sure where, but I think it was around a 30 minute drive away.
Similarly, when we needed decent winter/rain coats and they couldn’t afford to buy them from a shop, we had to make a trip even further away (around 45 mins, maybe an hour) to some slightly dodgy-looking garage/lock up filled with jackets and coats. My sister and I were then in possession of two cheaper (but not actually cheap, by today’s standards) waxed coats which would have lasted us for years, had mine not been stolen by some scumbag at my school a few weeks later. I still feel guilty about that, although it wasn’t my fault.
I have no idea how or where my parents heard about these places. I wonder if it was a ‘bloke down the pub knows someone’ kind of thing. I might ask them!
love it. They might not have been brand new or branded but they were bought with a lot of love. My dad used to get offered copied PS games in the 90s at work by random people that walked in off the streets in Barnsley. He didn't have a clue how good they were and those were the ones we played the most. It was nice of him to buy them
Not my parents but my auntie. Back in the late 1980s I'd seen this hip hop band called Stetsasonic on Yo! MTV raps. I had no chance of getting that cassette over here so just had to make do with watching them occasionally on MTV.
Coke Christmas I opened a disappointingly small present from my auntie and there it was. She'd had to call several American music shops until one agreed to mail her a copy. No idea how she even paid back then but that was next level to this teenage Brit.
I wanted a Zelda-themed 3DS console for christmas. and bless them, they got me the exact one I wanted. Looking back, I was very cheeky to not only ask for a 3DS, but a SPECIAL one that cost more cause it had a pretty shell. I was a lucky kid, and had a very happy christmas
We traveled all the way to our nearest big city to try and find a tamogotchi once but the shops there didn’t have any in stock either.
Our local Woolworths only got 10 in per week which naturally sold out in minutes.
A Playstation for Christmas in 1996. My mum spent ages trying to track one down because they were still selling out constantly and eventually managed to get one through Index. One of her friends, who was significantly better off than us, then tried to buy the Playstation off her for her own son because fuck me I guess. My mum was dumbfounded by her audacity and didn't take her up on the offer.
My dad worked in a rough area in Barnsley. Customers kept walking in offering copied games which sometimes my dad brought home..I thought that was nice
Another example, renting videos from the school library. I used to get Fireman Sam and watch it continuously for 20p a week .
My parents struggled to get me any of the TMNT figures. Dad then did a job at a distribution centre and the supervisor gave him the whole set! I was a briefly a playground legend
An obscure book. They drove miles to get it. I didn't have the heart to tell them I'd ordered it online, at a discount, as soon as it came out...
It's the thought♥️
My mum went around every cd shop within 50 miles trying to find tools "undertow" album for me , 13 years after it's release for Christmas in 2006 .... What a fucking trooper
My Mam told me that when I was about 5 (33 years ago), on night before Christmas Eve as she was putting me to bed I told her that I was looking forward to the drum Santa was going to get me. She panicked and said “You haven’t said anything about a drum before, you haven’t put it on your list” and I replied with “Yeah, but he knows that’s what I really want because he’s clever and magical. He’s definitely gonna get one for me”.
My Mam panicked because it was Christmas Eve the next day and both my parents were working. One would take over the parenting when they finished work while the other went to their work and there was no time at all to get one. She had to phone her best friend and beg her to find me a drum or a drum kit of some sorts. Luckily she found one that would go around my neck that I could hit while I walked.
My Dad fucking hated that drum!
My favourite colour is lime green, and has been since i was suuuper young. Its become a somewhat infamous thing in my family that i like getting things in green, specifically. When my parents first decided to get me a ds (around 2008-ish? So i wouldve been about 8) my dad went out of his way to specifically track down a bright lime green one.
I used it way after we eventually got dsi’s and stuff, and i was genuinely distraught when i eventually lost it. I appreciated the sheer fact he got me a green one (when there were so many easier colours!) soo much.
Give him a hug
We had a trampoline - very possible we got it second hand but looking back it must have been a slog for my single mum to wrangle all those big frame parts and get it home and put together wherever it came from.
Gave us so much joy (and exercise!) though - I remember running outside during the ad breaks on the telly to bounce and then running back in when I heard my programme come back on
Give her a hug
Jazz rag - remember nuts?
I got a PlayStation for Christmas 1995 and I'm sure they're was a shortage so my dad took a while to find one
Pokemon cards when they first came out. Toymaster had sold out, as had Wollies and WHSmiths. She found them in a local comic book shop a few doors down though.
A piano
I have always been amazed at how my parents ensured I had computers and learning software from such an early age (got my first in 1980 aged 8), because as I grew older I realised they had very little cash. They saw it as essential that I learned as that's how things were going and they were right.
They didn't, if it wasn't in the local shops you couldn't have it.
Still takes effort to order it in and check back in a week
Apparently my mum spent ages going round multiple stores with her friend to get all the kids Furbies!
It was in the era of the Internet but I think just before online shopping really took off but I do remember the hunt for a Wii when those came out
Like im aware online shopping was a thing then but it wasn't quite the juggernaut it is now
My dad and a friend nicked a flotation pool from a skip outside the uni he worked at, brought it home in sections and set it up as a swimming pool in our back garden. Didn’t buy it per se but he paid his friend in homemade wine.
It was he 70s
You guys had awesome parents.
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