Retailers Ask: Where Did Teenagers Go?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Or they can go to a thrift shop and get one for $2. That's what my daughter and half her friends do. It's even worse after that Macklemore song.
So where did the teenagers go?
Apple store.
(Odds that Phil was actually joking about the plaque: unknown)
"Hey, celebrities are buying overpriced things. Let's buy overpriced things and make fun of those who bought the same thing for less!"
...
"Hey, a musician sang a song about getting stuff cheap at the thrift store. Let's get all our stuff at the thrift store now! It's the same stuff, for cheaper!"
Because we are (largely) social animals and being accepted by a group is a powerful motivator (for most).
It just seems like you would have so much more time and energy to spend on other things when you stop thinking like an animal.
I'm not sure of the value in examining human behaviour while also dismissing the motivators of that behaviour as being silly.
The value is that I imagine (no data here, just conjecture) that many people could be much happier and freer to focus on other pursuits (that I feel are more worthy but I realize that this is entirely subjective) and not be so worried about "what do they think?". Because humans will be humans (as you've pointed out) I don't expect to change any minds here, but this is the way that I think. If nothing else, I'm simply giving away some food for thought.
People don't really want to fit in with others, they want to fit in with themselves. For some people that involves being the kind of person that buys expensive clothes. For you, that involves being the kind of person that doesn't buy expensive clothes. There is no difference, except that your thing is not externally visible, so you have to tell us about it. And you get to keep all that disposable income I guess.
You're also avoiding the identity equivalent of running your whole business on a 3rd party API, which is what people who base themselves on brands are doing. So you're probably ahead. But not really any different.
Then again, given your posts, it seems that you make a habit of missing the point. I suppose I'll move on.
And by the way, even if I do do it, that's just as silly as anybody else doing it. Don't confuse the philosopher with the philosophy.
When you posted here wondering why people try to hard to be accepted, that was your way of telling others "I am the kind of person who doesn't care about expensive clothes or following popular trends".
Sounds like retailers have discovered the downside to the constant anti-teenager policies of malls and shops treating them as hostile aliens to be driven off and sometimes even criminalized for being so "anti-social" as to try and go out shopping by themselves whilst under 21.
No wonder they buy online or just decide to play online games instead of going out. At least there they are not going to be harassed by mall cops or arrested by real cops and criminalized.
Ask the parents of those teens. I got harassed at the local mall as a quiet, well dressed biz-casual, heavily spending yuppie in my 20s by mall cops, I was speechless at the time, needless to say I'll never go there again, and I am not planning on letting my kids go there either.
They went to great effort to prevent young people from spending money at the mall. It took awhile, but young people are now not spending money at the mall. I'm not seeing much of a problem. When it closes we can build a nice condo there. If they could just hurry up and close, so we could get on with progress...
Check the Apple Store. They have ~10 products that change once a year. The former VP was smart enough to know that todays' kids are tomorrows' customers. They might not buy anything on the first or fourth visit but they'll eventually buy something.
I don't expect them to look like a discount merchanter (naked fluorescent bulbs, racks from last century), but there's something to be said about cheap chic. Which Forever21 (a favorite of the nieces) and H&M seem to get.
I don't see any general trend or problem with teen purchasing, only a handful of dinosaurs about to be left behind by newer more agile competitors.
That and it's a new game console year which probably puts dent on expendable teenage income.
A lot of folks are mentioning the Apple stores, which I'd certainly describe as creative and exciting. The article references H&M, which is more of a price/value play. Uniqlo probably touches on all of these things, though from anecdotal observation, it tends to skew a little older than teenagers. But have you ever been inside a Uniqlo that wasn't as packed and chaotic as a Disneyland ride? Say what you will about the shopping experience, but it's a pretty successful one. You wait in line for about 2 hours…but that's because there's an enormous line in the first place.
"That means that if Inditex stores in London, Tokyo and São Paulo all have customers responding enthusiastically to, let’s say, sequined cranberry-colored hot pants, Inditex can deliver more of these, or a variation on hot pants, sequins or that cranberry color, to stores within three weeks. The company tries to keep the stock fresh; one promise its stores make is that you will always be buying something nearly unique. Merchandise moves incredibly quickly, even by fast-fashion standards. All those thousands of Inditex stores receive deliveries of new clothes twice a week."
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/magazine/how-zara-grew-int...
Where did the teenagers go? Away from your retail store where they're not wanted (unless they're working minimum wage in your employ).
For the past 10 or so years I've heard nothing but stories about troublesome teenagers in stores/malls, shoplifting flash mobs made of 'urban yoots', etc. They've gone so far as to make electronic buzzers that only the young can hear and they use them to drive the kids away (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito).
When you've spent the better part of a decade labeling teens with anti-social labels and actively driving them away with noise maybe you shouldn't ask why all the teens left (and took their money with them).
>> “Probably the most important thing a teenage boy has is his smartphone,” said Richard Jaffe, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus. “Second, is probably his sneakers. Third, maybe, we get to his jeans.”
>> What may trump all of those, Mr. Jaffe said, are gaming systems, especially over the last few months, because Xbox and PlayStation both released new game consoles in 2013. That may have taken a bite out of what teenagers had to spend on clothes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/technology/nasty-gal-an-on...
Guess they are not "cool" again yet.
"They" watch what the really cool kids are doing, or at least the coolest kids they can find. When they've been consistently doing a particular thing for almost a decade, with the thing filtering down through the social hierarchy until almost-uncool people are doing it, that's the prime time to safely monetize the shit out of that thing for about 3 years until even your dad wouldn't be caught dead doing it.
Macklemore/ADA are kinda late to the party, "vintage" clothing stores have been milking that particular cash cow dry for a while now. Filtering down...
It's a process that sounds familiar to many people here, I'm sure.
But yes, this track is maybe not the best example for the point I'm making. Just replace "record companies spending millions of dollars" with "ADA spending some other very large amount of money and macklemore spending hundreds of man hours" and the point is the same.
That leads to the other interesting part- if he's already wealthy, does he care if the track makes a lot of money or not?
But, yes, for most any other hit pop song you'd be right.
The relationship between Macklemore and the ADA is fundamentally different from the traditional relationship between an artist and a record label, where the record label loans the artist money up front and takes care of all the promotional efforts in return for a majority share of the revenue from album sales. The ADA takes payment upfront - there is no "investment" going on. This is why Macklemore was able to take the lion's share of the profits from his album sales.
In fact, Macklemore addresses this very point in one of his songs on The Heist: http://rapgenius.com/Macklemore-and-ryan-lewis-jimmy-iovine-...
> But yes, this track is maybe not the best example for the point I'm making.
No, it's actually the worst possible example you could have picked.
> Just replace "record companies spending millions of dollars" with "ADA spending some other very large amount of money and macklemore spending hundreds of man hours" and the point is the same.
No, it's not the same. It's just about as different as it gets when it comes to the music industry.
That's not a fact, it's flat out wrong.