12 Household Items Every Family Had in the '70s

Every decade leaves behind objects that felt permanent at the time, and the 1970s left a big pile. Some lost out to a better machine, some got regulated off the shelf, and some quietly stopped being manufactured while nobody was looking. Here are 12 that lived in nearly every American house in 1975—and what happened to them.

1. The Percolator
2. The Fondue Pot
3. The Aluminum TV Dinner Tray
4. Avocado Green Appliances
5. The Popcorn Ceiling
6. The Rented Telephone
7. TV Guide
8. The Encyclopedia Set
9. The 8-Track Player
10. The Kodak Carousel
11. S&H Green Stamps
12. The Glass Fever Thermometer

The Percolator

Percolators had run American kitchens for generations. It took about five years to unseat them. Mr. Coffee, the first automatic drip brewer built for the home, went on sale in October 1972 with Joe DiMaggio as pitchman. A million units sold by 1975. By Christmas 1977, stores moved upward of 40,000 a day, and the brand held half the U.S. market.

The Fondue Pot

That heavy pot and its long forks reached America on the back of a cartel. The Swiss Cheese Union, founded in 1914, set milk prices and dictated which varieties dairy producers could make—then spent decades selling fondue as the national dish, mailing households recipes scaled from four servings to a hundred. A kickback scandal, a WTO finding that the union was a cartel, and the withdrawal of federal subsidies finished it off in 1999.

The Aluminum TV Dinner Tray

The three-compartment foil tray was built for an oven, which is why it died. Metal sparks in a microwave, so in 1986 Campbell Soup retired aluminum across all 61 varieties of Swanson frozen dinner for microwave-safe PET plastic. The original went to the Smithsonian that year—discontinued and enshrined in one motion.

Avocado Green Appliances

The palette wasn’t an accident. It was a product line. By General Electric’s own accounting, Coppertone arrived in 1964, Avocado in 1966, and Harvest Gold in 1968. The line lasted long enough to get softened 1976 reissues: Fresh Avocado and Harvest Wheat. GE went all-white at the start of the ’90s.

The Popcorn Ceiling

Sprayed-on acoustic texture hid drywall seams, deadened noise, and often contained asbestos. Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA banned spray-applied asbestos surfacing for fireproofing and insulation in 1973, then closed the gap in 1978 by banning the rest. The Consumer Product Safety Commission had already banned asbestos patching compounds in 1977.

The Rented Telephone

The phone on the kitchen wall wasn’t yours. Households leased their handsets and paid monthly for the privilege—roughly 55 million phones were still out on lease in 1984. The FCC’s July 1977 certification program let outside manufacturers connect third-party equipment, and after the 1984 AT&T breakup, customers could finally buy their leased phones outright or return them.

TV Guide

Before the on-screen program guide, a digest-sized magazine on the coffee table told you what was on. Circulation peaked near 20 million in 1970, making it the country’s most widely read magazine. It ran roughly 140 regional editions until October 17, 2005, when it swapped them for one national edition. By 2007, circulation was under three million.

The Encyclopedia Set

A shelf of matching gilt spines was the family search engine, sold door to door. Britannica’s U.S. sales peaked in 1990 at 120,000 sets, then cratered after Microsoft’s Encarta shipped on CD-ROM in 1993. In 1996 it laid off its entire North American sales force, ending 60 years of door-to-door selling.

The 8-Track Player

The 8-track’s appeal was that it played in a car; its problem was that the cassette did it smaller. U.S. sales peaked in 1978, then dropped off a cliff. Most retailers cleared the format out by 1983, though Columbia House and the RCA Music Service mailed cartridges to subscribers until 1988.

The Kodak Carousel

Family vacations lived in circular trays that held 80 or 140 slides, gravity-fed one at a time onto a bedsheet. Kodak introduced the Carousel in 1961 and kept some version in production for 43 years, ending in October 2004. Don Draper’s pitch on Mad Men was fiction. The machine was real.

S&H Green Stamps

You licked them, pasted them into a saver book, and traded full books for a toaster. Through the 1960s, S&H issued more stamps than the U.S. Postal Service and mailed 35 million catalogs a year. The model unwound over the following decades; by 1999, only about 100 U.S. stores still handed them out.

The Glass Fever Thermometer

Shake it down, hold it under your tongue, and pray nobody dropped it. A standard oral mercury thermometer holds about 0.61 grams of the metal, per the EPA—enough that at least 13 states now restrict retail sales, and NIST stopped calibrating them in 2011. The digital version costs about the same and requires no cleanup.

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