Modern material culture: home weigh-ins

We had an old Fairbanks-Morse platform scale. A person weighing 100 pounds or over had to add a counterweight to account for that. A person weighing over 150 pounds had to add another. There was nobody over 200 pounds. There was also a Fairbanks-Morse kerosene-fueled pump to bring water up the hill and into a sheet-metal cylindrical tank whence it flowed downhill when the cold-water tap was opened. But I digress.) I can remember a poison-green pre-WWII Health-O-Meter spring scale that wasn't ours. We were weighed when it was required in connection with the rare visits to a physician's office. I was weighed and measured in connection with fundies. We bought a Terraillon spring scale through the when Conran's Habitat store was first open. (We still own a great ashtray and a handsome table lamp from the same source. But I digress.) Sometime this summer, the spring went ker-boing and the scale was done for. So now we learn what has happened in the meantime. Courtesy of Target, we now harbor the cheapest scale that was in stock: by Taylor, but not mechanical. It requires a battery and has a stupid digital, not analog, read-out. Is this progress? It wasn't that we needed it; it was just that, just as soon as the old scale, used a few times a year, expired, curiosity about weight drove us to buy a new one.