Products that are a lot better than they used to be

Tortillas depend on where you are. I live now in tortilla despond, in m view, a surprise when I landed here. Yards and yards of shelves with fat fluffy flour tortillas. I like the thin sonora type. This is tortilla hell.

On the rest of your list, I agree.

Sorry for the space, something going on with my computer.

growing up in Illinois 60/70's all we had was frozen....I was not a food snob then like I am now, but that **** pissed me off.

TV dinners as they were called are better now. There is more choices and a few are edible once- in-a-while.

I dont do global positioning, what country are you in? I used to like Stouffer's but even they have gone downhill now. To me they all taste like cheap factory food now, some better than others.

Agree with the bagel comment. Definitely downhill for the last 20 years or so. More variety, but less bagelness.

I have to disagree about bread. I think that bread, too, has been on the decline. Sigh. I'm living in the past. (Not talking about packaged bread; talking about bakery bread.)

Actually, I was saying that you NY'ers have always had the bagel, but now the rest of us do too. I have noticed lately that it is nearly impossible to get a good one in the supermarkets, and where I am now we don't hardly have any bagel shops, which is the first time in 2o years I have lived without a good bagel shop. Now you have me wondering if this is something that is not just a local problem.

Flashlight batteries are better. Used to be if you left them in a flashlight or radio for a year, there was nothing left but a wad of black, corrosive goo. Now, they still work.

Bagels used to be very different. Hard, not just chewy. Stronger taste. Turned stale almost instantly. For the last 20 years or so, bagels have become soft and bready. Not what I remember from childhood. I have some fairly decent bagel shops in my neighborhood. But they sell new bagels, not old ones. Better than nothing.

I used to like TV dinners, until I looked at the sodium content. Now I rarely buy them.

Lawn mowers
chainsaws
wine

sex (although strictly speaking thats not a product)

I live in a place where independent small producers and marketers are flourishing, so, yes, bread and coffee and yogurt are better here. Independent bakeries flourish as do coffee roasters. My yogurt comes from a farmer who grass feeds his cows and who has joined with other, small herd (4 - 16 cows) to produce yogurt. The farmers are making more money than they had when they sold their milk to large dairy interests.

However, mass market bread is the pits as it always was. Coffee is meh. And mass market yogurt has really gone down hill, polluted with corn syrup.