I have written a couple of times recently about millennials talking about things boomers still do that have lost their coolness, if they ever had any.
A couple of examples:
Boomers still love to go to the mall, while the younger, hipper among us shop online.
Boomers still love to go to restaurants, while those of the young and hip persuasion order food to be delivered.
Then there are books and newspapers. Walk into a Barnes & Noble sometime and see how few people are in there. People don’t seem to be reading anymore, and when they do, it’s usually not actual books.
Videos? Remember how crowded Blockbuster Video stores were on weekends in the 1990s? Even when VHS tapes gave way to DVDs, folks crowded into rental stores to take movies home for convenient viewing.
Of course, those folks staying at home and watching videos were no longer going to movie theatres., and online streaming services pretty much wiped out the video stores too.
Now despite my boomerosity, I’ve never been a huge fan of malls or video rental stores. I’ll bet I do more shopping on Amazon than most millennials. I have five different orders arrive in the last week alone, ranging from a CPAP mask to a plumber’s snake to a set of eclipse masks.
Of course, the reason I ordered those things from Amazon was that I couldn’t find them in local stores.
But here’s the thing our self-righteous youngsters seem to have forgotten.
Every time a store closes, every time a chain goes out of business, jobs vanish forever. If a mall closes, hundreds and hundreds of jobs are gone and won’t be coming back.
So the working class gets poorer and poorer and the folks who own the massive businesses get richer and richer.
Solve that.
In the end, there won’t even be enough jobs for people who can learn to say, “Do you want fries with that.”
A hard rain’s gonna fall.