- Registrado
- 29 de Sep, 2022
There's a lot of things that boomers and Gen X enjoyed that sort of died when millennials came of age and are seen as "irrelevant" or "dying".
My argument is not that these things are irrelevant (having predated the boomers) but are struggling because at some point they started to suck and the times they don't suck are when people pay attention, or at least would pay attention, with my three examples being movies, printed media, and brick-and-mortar stores.
Keep in mind that there's still other forces at play here like the undesirables moving in and causing either through their "culture" or crime to ruin such things, or the general gutting of the economy, but they've also gotten so much worse in spite of that, and in some cases, that's less relevant.
My first example is movie theaters. This should be pretty easy, a lot of them closed over the years and streaming is often fingered as the reason for why the movie theater experience isn't what it was, but if you look at the upcoming releases, they suck. Gone are the days of summer blockbusters and the big Christmas releases, where you could expect quality almost any time of the year. Plus, there's all that stuff about pre-buying tickets and having to pay additional fees, you can't just come in early and take a seat, it's a whole process. When you have a movie that people like and want to see, then people will come see it.
The last ten years have seen diversity hires and sequels to beloved franchises that not only were pretty crap but burned goodwill and retroactively made the franchise much worse for it. (Do I have to even list examples?) Make movies that people want to see and stop pandering to foreigners, they can make their own movies. (The top-grossing film worldwide of 2025 was Ne Zha 2, which was a movie for China, by China.) You gotta make your own films for your own people, trying to spread out too far means you'll be mediocre at best. A good example of a 2025 movie was A Minecraft Movie which was for Gen Z, and it did well because it was a movie that the zoomers actually enjoyed. I don't think zoomers have anything against the kinoplex, they just normally don't go because movies suck these days. Why would you want to visit cinema if all the movies suck?
Example 2: Printed media, specifically magazines and newspapers. I've been downloading and re-reading Nintendo Power magazines (I do have a print collection, missing maybe 50 issues or so but a good collection) and it's amazing what the magazine looked like in its glory days versus what it looked like in the last 6-7 years of its life. I know in this case magazines have to follow the trends of video games and the Wii era was not really the console where you needed strategies to beat the game, but it was stuff like that and stripping out everything else that made the magazine interesting ultimately doomed it.
But newspapers have no excuse. My local paper doesn't even print daily anymore, and when it does it's just newsletter-sized that prints whatever AP was printing. When I go back and look at the newspaper archives online (I have a subscription to newspapers.com) the difference is night and day. There's the normal AP news and syndicated columns, but there was a large sports section that talked about not only the local university team and the major leagues but also the high schools, too. There were comics (the larger papers like in Houston had 4-5 pages of the stuff), there was classifieds that actually were real classifieds and job listings, and applying to them meant it was probably read by a real person not discarded because a thousand Indians wrote fake résumés. There was local news, maybe reviewing a new restaurant in town and discussing which ones have closed. (Nowadays these are on fleeting Instagram pages and forums AT BEST). There were human interest columns with whole sections on outdoor living, food, television, local culture, everything.
These "extraneous" columns probably aren't the reason most people read newspapers but cutting them out has had some clearly disastrous end results.
The last one is brick-and-mortar stores. They say that everyone wants to buy things online these days and for some people that may be true but a large part of this is that people don't have the option of brick-and-mortar stores. In every retail bankruptcy, most of these stores went under because they had problems with the stores themselves. Stores were dirty, or overpriced, or had problems with missing inventory, or were full of things that no one wanted to buy. A lot of these stores that people have nostalgia for, including Toys R Us, Kmart, or Fry's Electronics, had major problems under the hood. I think with Amazon's propensity for shipping out damaged, used, or counterfeit goods, there is absolutely a market for these sorts of stores. In malls that are still alive, a lot of space is being taken up by direct-to-consumer stores where brands are sold directly to consumers, which builds brand loyalty but also creates a system where the people there know their product. For some brands they merchandise their stuff directly in larger stores (Swiffer products at the local supermarket) even if they don't operate stores directly.
The store problem follows the same problem:
1. Stores lose what attracted people in the first place.
2. People stop going to the store because it sucks.
3. "Analysts" see this as proof that people prefer the inferior option (Internet shopping).
Zoomers and millennials WILL return to newspapers, cinemas, and real stores but they aren't because they suck. I know that boomers got a lot of blame for ruining things but I'm pretty sure that these started sucking when Gen X started running things.
My argument is not that these things are irrelevant (having predated the boomers) but are struggling because at some point they started to suck and the times they don't suck are when people pay attention, or at least would pay attention, with my three examples being movies, printed media, and brick-and-mortar stores.
Keep in mind that there's still other forces at play here like the undesirables moving in and causing either through their "culture" or crime to ruin such things, or the general gutting of the economy, but they've also gotten so much worse in spite of that, and in some cases, that's less relevant.
My first example is movie theaters. This should be pretty easy, a lot of them closed over the years and streaming is often fingered as the reason for why the movie theater experience isn't what it was, but if you look at the upcoming releases, they suck. Gone are the days of summer blockbusters and the big Christmas releases, where you could expect quality almost any time of the year. Plus, there's all that stuff about pre-buying tickets and having to pay additional fees, you can't just come in early and take a seat, it's a whole process. When you have a movie that people like and want to see, then people will come see it.
The last ten years have seen diversity hires and sequels to beloved franchises that not only were pretty crap but burned goodwill and retroactively made the franchise much worse for it. (Do I have to even list examples?) Make movies that people want to see and stop pandering to foreigners, they can make their own movies. (The top-grossing film worldwide of 2025 was Ne Zha 2, which was a movie for China, by China.) You gotta make your own films for your own people, trying to spread out too far means you'll be mediocre at best. A good example of a 2025 movie was A Minecraft Movie which was for Gen Z, and it did well because it was a movie that the zoomers actually enjoyed. I don't think zoomers have anything against the kinoplex, they just normally don't go because movies suck these days. Why would you want to visit cinema if all the movies suck?
Example 2: Printed media, specifically magazines and newspapers. I've been downloading and re-reading Nintendo Power magazines (I do have a print collection, missing maybe 50 issues or so but a good collection) and it's amazing what the magazine looked like in its glory days versus what it looked like in the last 6-7 years of its life. I know in this case magazines have to follow the trends of video games and the Wii era was not really the console where you needed strategies to beat the game, but it was stuff like that and stripping out everything else that made the magazine interesting ultimately doomed it.
But newspapers have no excuse. My local paper doesn't even print daily anymore, and when it does it's just newsletter-sized that prints whatever AP was printing. When I go back and look at the newspaper archives online (I have a subscription to newspapers.com) the difference is night and day. There's the normal AP news and syndicated columns, but there was a large sports section that talked about not only the local university team and the major leagues but also the high schools, too. There were comics (the larger papers like in Houston had 4-5 pages of the stuff), there was classifieds that actually were real classifieds and job listings, and applying to them meant it was probably read by a real person not discarded because a thousand Indians wrote fake résumés. There was local news, maybe reviewing a new restaurant in town and discussing which ones have closed. (Nowadays these are on fleeting Instagram pages and forums AT BEST). There were human interest columns with whole sections on outdoor living, food, television, local culture, everything.
These "extraneous" columns probably aren't the reason most people read newspapers but cutting them out has had some clearly disastrous end results.
The last one is brick-and-mortar stores. They say that everyone wants to buy things online these days and for some people that may be true but a large part of this is that people don't have the option of brick-and-mortar stores. In every retail bankruptcy, most of these stores went under because they had problems with the stores themselves. Stores were dirty, or overpriced, or had problems with missing inventory, or were full of things that no one wanted to buy. A lot of these stores that people have nostalgia for, including Toys R Us, Kmart, or Fry's Electronics, had major problems under the hood. I think with Amazon's propensity for shipping out damaged, used, or counterfeit goods, there is absolutely a market for these sorts of stores. In malls that are still alive, a lot of space is being taken up by direct-to-consumer stores where brands are sold directly to consumers, which builds brand loyalty but also creates a system where the people there know their product. For some brands they merchandise their stuff directly in larger stores (Swiffer products at the local supermarket) even if they don't operate stores directly.
The store problem follows the same problem:
1. Stores lose what attracted people in the first place.
2. People stop going to the store because it sucks.
3. "Analysts" see this as proof that people prefer the inferior option (Internet shopping).
Zoomers and millennials WILL return to newspapers, cinemas, and real stores but they aren't because they suck. I know that boomers got a lot of blame for ruining things but I'm pretty sure that these started sucking when Gen X started running things.
