At the end of the day, you mostly just ended up paying full retail price for everything.

Unless you got a flyer/ad in the mail that listed out specific deals for things, you didn’t really have any visibility into pricing outside of the physical locations you could visit, or what someone might tell you over the phone. So, shopping by price was much more labor intensive than it is now. Most of the time, if you wanted to find out the price of something you would have to physically drive to that location and see what they had and what it cost.

It also wasn’t super long ago that the concept of stores like Wal-mart or Target did not exist. So, aside from it being difficult to compare prices, you also just didn’t really have a lot of options for finding products at different locations. Maybe groceries allowed for this as most people had at least a couple grocery stores within a reasonable distance. But outside of that, you generally had to travel to specific stores, and there might only be one store near you that carried what you wanted. So, if you wanted toys or video games, you went to Toys R Us, because that was the only place that had a decent selection of those things. And when you went there, you paid whatever the retail price was for the thing you wanted.

Edit: So to summarize, it used to be that finding the thing you wanted was the hard part, whereas now it’s more about finding the right price for the thing you want.