History Main / TheyDontMakeThemLikeTheyUsedTo

* In the former USSR, there's quite a lot of nostalgia about Soviet industrial goods which were renowned for their extreme durability and reliability. It wasn't uncommon for an off-the-shelf appliance to stay on duty for ''decades'' and be passed between generations. A large number of them are still in use today, 25 years after the end of the UsefulNotes/ColdWar, and it's not a miracle (though still rare) to see, say, a fridge or a vacuum cleaner that's ''half a century'' old and has retained almost all the original parts. They do require occasional maintenance, yet since they've been built with simplicity and repairability in mind, the repair can be done with common tools and consumables. Spares ''are'' a problem, but custom parts are the minority and typically last the longest, and in the worst case, a broken piece can typically be reinforced with available materials or outright made from them anew without any industrial-grade equipment. The downside is their durability and repairability comes at the cost of performance. In comparison to modern equipment, Soviet goods are bulky, heavy, power-hungry, inefficient, technically obsolete and severely lacking in the aesthetic department (though [[{{Retraux}} this is a matter of taste]]) and ergonomics. These characteristics have given birth to many a joke (e.g.: "American scientists have 10 times as much equipment as ours, but each piece of our equipment is 10 times as much!"). Household appliances typically end up on UsefulNotes/{{dacha}}s where everyday efficiency and ergonomics are less of a requirement, and "good" stuff can quickly degrade from adverse conditions or be stolen by wintertime thieves which dachas are largely defenseless against. To summarize, many who had experience with Soviet equipment are nostalgic about it, but few would actually trade a modern piece for one of those.

** Weaponized by the dwarf Longbeards: None of them have less than five centuries of fighting goblins, orcs and horrible things from underground, and therefore can be forever heard to complain that the goblins used to be tougher, or beer used to taste better, or... Other dwarf units can reroll failed rolls just to avoid the pointed looks and sarcastic remarks on how they clearly don't make dwarfs like they used to either (case in point).
** Nearly every other dwarf subscribes to similar philosophies - a lot of the Empire's blackpowder knowledge comes from dwarves thrown bodily out of the Engineers' Guild for being too radical (too radical in this case meaning hasn't undergone literal centuries of testing).

* Many people have become nostalgic for old cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions and computer monitors compared to modern liquid crystal display (LCD) ones, citing some ways in which they are superior to modern LCD screens. While modern [=LCDs=] have an obvious advantage in resolution[[note]]HD [=CRTs=] can and do exist, but never caught in in the mainstream[[/note]], [=CRTs=] can trump them in display of darker colors (which only expensive OLED displays come close to matching), input latency[[note]]Important for video games, especially NintendoHard retro ones[[/note]] and image scaling[[note]][=LCDs=] have issues displaying resolutions other than their native ones, whereas [=CRTs=] are much more flexible in the resolutions they can display without quality degradation, including support for non-square pixels, which many older game consoles and computers took advantage of[[/note]].

* In Seth's ''It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken'' our main character has this feeling about old buildings, museum exhibits, and well...ok, everything.