Looking at the generations from the Fourth Turning perspective

[pbrower2a]

(06-14-2018, 07:08 PM)sbarrera Wrote:

(06-12-2018, 08:55 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(06-11-2018, 10:49 AM)beechnut79 Wrote: But in that "traditional" America there were, for the most part, no stores open on Sunday. Don't believe we have returned to that meme anywhere even in red America, Chick-Fil-A notwithstanding.

I seriously doubt though that the Millennials will make like the last generation of its archetype, the GIs, and return us to the days of the Organization Man/Suzy Homemaker lifestyle. Someone here mentioned nostalgia for the days of Mom and Pop shops on Main Street. For said return to happen many would have to be willing to sacrifice some of their conveniences.

Returning to "sense of things" doesn't require returning to the last implementation of that sense.  Millennials appear to be the first generation to reject the merchant-customer model.  They may come to regret it, but deciding to reverse course is less than likely.  They have no emotional tie to that model, so it would be a faux nostalgia for a time gone by.  

Boomers grew up watching GI-produced Westerns on TV.  Almost none of that generation had actually lived in the West they portrayed.  Few if any were actually realistic.  All the gritty Westerns came later.

I'm curious - how are Millennials rejecting the merchant-customer model? Jeff Bezos is the ultimate merchant and the richest guy ever! Is it that online marketplaces are the new model?

Sears got its start (outside its flagship store) as a catalog retailer. One got the catalog and bought seemingly anything (people even bought automobiles and kit housing) available at the time through mail order. Amazon uses the computer. At one time, the mailbox was effectively a Sears outlet; your computer is now effectively an outlet of Amazon.com. Thus the mode can change, and certainly the technology of stuff that you buy, but the retailing is much the same. Pick out of a printed catalog (Sears in its heyday) or search for the item yourself (Amazon probably in its heyday). The difference for all practical purposes? An outdated Sears catalog might become toilet paper.

Efficiency and access make retail success. What is failing is the brick-and-motor stores. Many of the retail buildings are beached whales, once-proud behemoths now rotting hulks. Maybe in halcyon times the shopping mall that was an expensive way to sell stuff to people could turn their novelty into a sort of entertainment. When there was little better to do with spare time than go shopping, and America had a free-spending middle class with predictable demographics (white and Anglo, so these places did not have to accommodate cultural difference as they do now), the malls could become forums for stereotyped shopping in rigidly-managed boutiques if one did not shop in the 'anchor' stores.

OK, retail stores never recovered from the 2007-2009 downturn. People found that they could do things other than shop... and they could hold off on buying the latest gadget or fad, sticking with old stuff instead of casting it off until it became unserviceable. 

Americans loved the razzle-dazzle of retailing in the 1980s. It is now stale and largely irrelevant. We are now in much the same stage of the 4T as Americans were in the last one in the late 1930s. Of course the political realities are different.  If Obama wasn't the new FDR, Donald Trump is the antithesis of FDR. Trump is close to being an out-and-out fascist in a country with no tradition of support for fascist policies except among the lunatic fringe.

Of course I do not expect America to end up in a war with Germany, Italy, and Japan; we do not have slavery rending America; and we have no problem with British overlords trying to micromanage everything in the Colonies. Every Crisis Era is different because the Big Problem is different every time. This time it is the prospect of government by economic elites, for economic elites, and by economic elites -- Mussolini's corporate state that assumes that a foundry laborer has more in common with the ownership and management of the foundry than he does with a mine worker.