A Note to Millennials: It’s Not Your Fault

I was moderating a fireside chat at the National Retail Federation conference with Liz Thompson from Southeastern Grocers recently.  We were chatting about her company’s efforts to reengage employees as a means of furthering SEG’s corporate transformation. Along the way, we briefly discussed how the use of bite-sized training exercises appealed to younger employees. It was at this point that I made the comment that contrary to popular thinking I believed Millennials don’t suffer from shortened attention spans.  Rather, they simply have a much higher sensitivity to things that are boring.

The quote was captured by my fellow analyst Andrew Busby and circulated on Twitter and within a few minutes was already prompting responses ranging from those who concurred to those who expressed disgust at the mere notion that anyone in the retail industry should feel obligated to tailor the way we do business to such an “entitled” and accommodated generation.

It all got me thinking about the broader idea around Millennials and the current state of retail.  

At the most basic level one can’t deny that Millennials are a post-internet generation that has inherited a retail landscape that was built in and for a pre-internet world. There are far too many stores in existence and the vast majority of them have absolutely no experiential value – they’re merely well-lit warehouses. And yet we somehow expect the most visually stimulated, connected and socially integrated generation in the history of the planet to enjoy shopping in them?

We roll our eyes when Millennials suggest that experiences mean more to them than products – as if to suggest one day they’ll mature to appreciate banality of material possessions.  Yet, we seemingly forget that this is a generation that has literally documented every meaningful event in their lives online. Experiences are their outward expression to the world of who they are. Experiences are their social currency.

For my generation, social currency was measured by the car you drove to school or the house you lived in.  For Millennials, social currency is comprised by where they are, who they’re with and what they’re doing. And yet we scoff when they say they’d like stores that are Instagram-able and social in nature, when in truth it’s what we all want and what the industry desperately needs   

We’re incredulous at their reticence to work in the retail industry, speculating that it must be for lack of work ethic.  We forget that when they look at this industry they see a ladder of mobility stripped of its rungs by technology – middle management barely exists today.  They see people their parents’ age in C-level positions, refusing to retire until their 401K’s recuperate from a financial meltdown that also happened to hobble Millennial incomes.  And until such time, these same executives refuse to take even the slimmest risk of disrupting the companies they run for fear of jeopardizing their payout. They see woefully underpaid front-line workers having to work two and three jobs just to survive.  Is it any wonder many beat a path to tech hubs for employment?

Well Millennials, I’m here to say formally that it’s not your fault.  The broken-down retail industry we see in front of us is not your doing.  You didn’t conceive it. You didn’t build it. And you haven’t caused its demise.

But one thing is real and true.  We need you to fix it. We need the best and brightest of you to take a chance on this ailing industry and reimagine how great it could be.  We need your innate social proclivity, your tech savvy and your desire to do business in a way that preserves the planet.  We need your energy, creativity and willingness to risk.

And most importantly, we need you now.