Laptops and home consoles have killed the arcades and made them obsolete today. The popularity of arcades saw a rapid decline by 2012 as the in-home gaming experience became affordable. The traditional after-school hangouts are now a nostalgic spot and have stopped being profitable.
Old Vintage Arcade Video Games in an empty dark gaming room with blue light. Image credit: Shutterstock
Popular after-school hangout destinations, the arcades, used to be packed. They were a huge success and peaked in 1982 generating around a current-day equivalent of $18.5 billion that year.
Phones and the Internet becoming fast and accessible for everyone have changed the way people play games, and arcades are slowly dying off. The arcade revenues went from making $7 billion a year to just under $2 billion by 2004 and declined to $866 million with the introduction of many powerful game consoles.
Recently, people have been designing arcades to pay homage to the games they played when they were younger. Even though this looked like a resurgence for the industry, it did not bring in much business. Arcades tried a major comeback when the home consoles failed to provide bigger and better games.
They came up with some popular games, but the business required a huge setup and safety measures like an amusement park. That also did not last long and increased expenses.
The shift of socio-culture behavior with the advent of the Internet also led to the rapid decline as people no longer require face-to-face interaction. Die-hard in-home gamers will not prefer going to an arcade even though the experience is much different there. (1, 2)
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7 Bees
Bees are dying at a very alarming rate due to pesticides, habitat destruction, air pollution, global warming, and more. Bhutan has set an example to the world by adopting 100% organic farming to prevent bees from dying off highly chemical pesticides.
Flying honey bee collecting pollen at a yellow flower. Image credit: Shutterstock
Bees play an important role in our ecosystem. If bees go extinct, we would be out of coffee, lemons, avocados, and even oranges. The bees contribute $18 billion to the economy of the United States due to their pollination.
Due to poor nutrition, use of pesticides, and parasites, bees are slowly dying off, and there has been a tremendous reduction in their population in recent years. The chemical industry is playing a major part in this as now it has been found that their pollen has chemical residues in it.
Bee habitat shrinks every year when grasslands become agricultural lands. Chemical companies, even after repeated warnings, refuse to change their policies and continue selling poisonous chemicals to farmers. (1, 2)
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8 Glaciers and Icecaps
Ice acts as a protective cover for Earth and its oceans. Rapid glacier melts in Antarctica and Greenland influence ocean currents and rising sea levels. Around 95% of the oldest and thickest glaciers and ice caps in the Arctic are completely gone.
Iceberg in the Southern coast of Greenland. Image credit: Shutterstock
Human activities are the root of glaciers melting and warming of oceans. Greenhouse gas emissions, carbon dioxide, and the industrial revolution are the reasons for rapid melting at the poles.
The remaining glaciers of the world will melt by the year 2100 according to a 2019 study by the University of Zurich. There is 335 billion-tons-loss of ice per year, and this is contributing rapidly to ocean growth.
If the emissions continue to rise without any preventive measures, the Arctic will be ice-free by 2040 and the entire Earth will have an increase in air temperature. Melting glaciers add to rising sea levels which leads to coastal erosion.
Warming of air temperature can cause intense and frequent storms and hurricanes. The ice sheets in Greenland are disappearing four times faster than they were in 2003. This alone contributes to 20% of the sea-level rise. (1, 2)
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9 Cable Television
Since 2015, cable and satellite TV usage dropped from 76% in 2015 to 56% in 2021. The reports say the costs are too high, and around 45% of viewers do not watch TV anymore, and the U.S. streaming services have taken over, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Image credit: Shutterstock
“Cord-cutting,” or not frequently using cable television, has become common since 2015. They feast on subscriber fees and revenue from advertisements. As online streaming services are in high demand, even cable channels are trying to sell their content to such services.
Netflix started as a fellow revenue-generating stream but soon grew so much in popularity that it has more shows released than the cable television industry a decade earlier.
The number of households using pay-TV is slowly dying off. It reduced from 105 million in 2010 to 82.9 million by 2020 and is expected to dive to 70 million by 2023. Most mainstream entertainment channels have dropped to double-digit ratings in recent years.
Cable TV is still not equipped enough to deal with the upcoming OTT threat. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an all-time increase in the usage of online streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu, which marked the starting of the cord-cutting era.
Cord-cutting was considered to be something that will never happen, but people have started to find cable TV to be an unwanted expense as they can see everything online now. (1, 2)
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10 Cars with Manual Transmission.
Even though purists prefer a manual transmission, these are dying out. In the US, only 13% of new car models are offered with a manual variant. In 2011, it was 37%. Automatics have moved from a luxury feature in the past to a high-demand as they assist better in different terrains.
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Carmakers confirm that the demand for stick shifts has declined, and soon only a few manufacturers will make and sell them. Automatic cars are berated for their inability to shift as precisely as a manual transmission car, but the technology has improved. Some people still prefer to have a sense of control over the car when driving. Automatic cars saw a huge peak in the 1980s when it was first introduced.
For about thirty years, manual transmission offered a broad range of four to six gear when automatic transmission only offered three. The manual transmission also has better torque control, acceleration, hauling, and good climbing and descending control, unlike automatic.
Less expensive manual cars are easily found nowadays. They are cheap to build and cheaper and easier to fix. Automatic cars have also evolved to be as precise as manual transmissions.
Electric cars are the future. Teslas have only a single-speed, but currently, electric cars are only a small portion of the market. If they take off, then the idea of transmission will become a thing of the past. They are only a few companies that offer manual transmission now to please the purists. (Source)
