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I seem to have had a different A-Level experience from you (1998-2000). There was a certain amount of learn-this-trend-by-rote, but I would easily class A-Level chemistry (which I didn't even do that well in) as one of the most practicably useful subject choices I've taken.
There's a bunch of stuff I know which my other similarly-educated peers don't, and which I attribute to A-Level chemistry. Some of it is everyday stuff about which paint and glue and cleaning products are appropriate for which purpose. Some of it is useful for reasoning about topical scientific claims, such as biofuels, pharmaceuticals or nutrition.
I even have a control case for this, in that my sister and I studied all the same subjects, only she took electronics at A-Level over chemistry. When one of us says something "obvious" which the other person doesn't recognise as such, we have a pretty good idea where it came from.
Just to be clear, I didn't make any comment on how useful A-level chemistry in the UK is (or was in ~1986-1988 when I took it). Only on the annoying pseudo-explanations I had to learn to give. (I expect there are useful things that I know only because I studied chemistry at school, but it's hard to be sure because by now I've learned a lot of other things and forgotten a lot of what I learned at school.)