In college, I started seeing low-effort headlines claiming yet another corporate industry death at the hands of millennial. A typical example is the casual sit-down restaurant, and you can see a compilation of such claims (along with subsequent refutations) in this CB Insights post. I’d rather focus on the broader phenomenon and the various fallacies of thinking that lead to these poor and useless critiques of an entire generation.
The Customer’s Always Right
Ah yes, that old adage. Oft-repeated, and nearly as often misunderstood and misapplied by precisely the generation accusing millennial of ruining what was once good. The ruined version of it is used by uptight, frustrated people as a way of saying I have a problem, and you need to fix it immediately. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is (even though it was definitely mine.)
Despite these willful twists of the phrase, its original intent remains true to this day: it is the role of a business to meet the demands of its customers. If a product or service flops, it’s not often due solely to poor marketing, a bad review, or the product being “ahead of its time”. It’s because it fails to meet a need or desire among its target market.
The customer is always right because if a customer decides not to buy something from a company, then that company doesn’t have a customer. To that point, an entire generation is not responsible for an industry faltering: the companies that comprise that industry are failing to address its changing demographic.
But Won’t Anyone Think of the Corporations?
We’ve shifted into a time where companies are personified as individuals, and are given far more rights than they should reasonably have. Some people have incredible brand loyalty, and when coupled with nostalgia for a bygone era we see a strange defense of these companies that are listing in the seas of a new generation because they fail to accept a change in the world.
Older companies in particular have massive inertia that make it difficult for them to pivot, and for some reason there are swathes of people who believe they deserve at least the same level of care, attention, and leeway we provide retired people in a nursing home. People bail them out, offer excuses for their behavior, and claim that just because they’ve been around for a long time they inherently deserve anything.
Corporations are not people, yet we seem to be less comfortable with their mortality than we are with our own. We spend huge amounts of money to prop up failing companies, while a certain segment of the population laughs at the idea of an individual’s right to access healthcare or other social security assistance.
Maybe that’s because corporations are a construct, so they feel somehow more manageable, something we should be able to optimize and improve upon in a way that’s far more difficult to do with the whole of humanity. We have some expectation that the companies of our youth will persist, and want to do anything we can to hold onto those familiar products and brands. If that’s the case, we should have higher expectations for how they operate. Better yet, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize them in any way. If we want to take issue with (or celebrate) anything a company does, direct it at the people who made the decisions and did the work. Then it becomes something akin to a conversation, rather than a poor, helpless behemoth of a company being bullied by this centrally-directed mass of the populace born across several decades.
Nothing New Here
Generational tiffs start up every decade or two. We enjoy characterizing entire generations and their impact on the world, with the media making sweeping claims about the upcoming youth as if their generation wasn’t the ones responsible for raising them. This hypocrisy exists most acutely among millennials with the participation trophy situation. We are accused of needing individual attention, or deserving recognition for just being around, and all this because we were raised on participation trophies.
Millennials didn’t ask for any such trophies: their parents did.
So much of the large-scale frustration that occurs across generational gaps is due to the projection of insecurities coupled with a fear of no longer being relevant. As a new generation becomes parents, they will attempt to fix the perceived issues they had with their childhood by addressing their various anxieties. However, while growing older and wanting their own knowledge and wisdom to matter, they cannot or will not recognize that their life experience is becoming terribly expired not only because of technical progress, but because they have collectively created an experience disjointed from their, built from their effort to make the world better (or at least different).
This cycle goes on. I will fall victim to it as I age and can no longer culturally relate to kids. But that’s the beauty of being curious and empathetic, rather than defensive and accusatory: you can positively relate to someone without having actually experienced their life or culture by being genuinely interested in them. Seek to understand why someone is taking a particular action, rather than blaming them for living a life that isn’t successful according to your personal metrics.