Are You Hip With The Young Kids?

I work in Books.  So the continual question of Are bookstores still valid? is ever present.  Do you have an online presence?  If you don't, you must be sunk.  How is your social media?  How many followers?  And the always grody question: Are you hip with the young kids?  (Gag me with a spoon, but it had to be said.)  Those young kids now being Millennials.  And everyone is scrambling to find out who they are, what they like, how to tap into their world.  They are as big as the Baby Boomers are.  My generation is sandwiched between 2 incredible, vastly different buying super powers.

At my job, our Marketing Dept is also having an on-going brainstorm about Millennials and just like every church seems to be, we are trying to figure out how to draw in young people.  People not necessarily attached to their parents.

It started with this idea of M's rejuvenating local shopping and neighborhood places.  Independent bookstores are seeing an upswing if you can believe it.  More are opening, and more of those by young people.  It's natural; people grow up and eventually start to do adult things.  But there has been a marked revitalization of a neighborhood mentality, of community, of shopping locally, keeping dollars in the area, partly because of this younger crowd.  I came of age with big box stores being awesome, then the fight to keep the little guys.  M's have grown up with an easy balance between online shopping, (not the horror to them it was to some of us,) and local stores.

Our discussion evolved to coming off the idea of your choices and habits being open to the possibility of being "hacked"--not literally, more that your options are subject to someone else's preferences than your own--by the new Amazon practice of allowing anyone to win the bid on a Buy button, possibly pushing publishers off of their own book sales.

One coworker commented that Millennials think nothing of the fact that once you put it out there, yeah, it's on the internet, so what? because they have grown up with this.  People of even slightly older generations might be worried about their information being actually hacked, or find the notion that choices are being fed to them via unseen algorithms disconcerting, but Millennials accept this and even use it themselves, or appreciate the suggestions.  Not that they are mindless--not at all.  They are simply aware that this is the process and are unafraid of it.  Older generations are alarmed at finding themselves in an information bubble whereas Millennials are like "Duh.  Of course there are bubbles."

So, to continue this thread, I had a new idea to throw into the mix:

If Millennials have grown up in this way, with a greater awareness and acceptance of this, does it also make them more capable of unplugging?  For example, is unplugging as natural for them as their acceptance of internet culture?  Are they better at it because it's natural?

And does that inform our marketing efforts of physical books, an atmosphere, a non-internet experience, when they choose to have it?

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You Must Be Joking

Re; 1600 Daily 6/20/17:
"President Donald J. Trump is embracing big change, bold thinking, and outsider perspectives to transform government and make it work better, and at a far less cost. This new spirit of innovation will make life better for all Americans by modernizing critical IT systems, making government more transparent, and saving the taxpayers up to $1 trillion dollars over the next 10 years."

Make it work better--this is obviously incorrect.  His "outsider perspective" is proven contrary to the Constitution and illegal at every turn.

Making government more transparent--You must be joking.
There are 3 congressional investigations into his campaign, his financial ties to Russia, his own obstruction of justice in regard to those, and he continues to profit from his position through his personal business, as do his family.  His children have high-level access to state information as undefined counsel to the office and continue to refuse to divest their interests from their own businesses.
He has yet to release his taxes.
He tweets policies later contradicted by his own statements and spokespeople.
There is nothing about any of these examples that creates a more transparent government.  This president personalizes power rather than being an instrument of it.  That is not a transparent democracy.

I find these updates a compilation of poor spin-doctoring, the only result of an administration without experience and out of its depth.

Fact Check This

Re: 1600 Daily 6/8/17:
"'[Senator Schumer] had confused the official statistics. At the time, the 63 nominees awaiting Senate approval were in addition to the 39 confirmed – meaning that Trump had nominated 102 people to top posts overall.' - Fox News"

Guys.  Seriously.  If fact checking is "what you're reading" you are behind the times.  The nation has been fact-checking the vague superlatives of the president since his candidacy's infancy, and finding huge holes--no superlative needed.  If you want to start slinging "confused...official statistics" arrows, be prepared for the barrage that will come back at you, derived from factual evidence.  A concept as foreign to the president as coherent speech.

And to pluck such a random, inconsequential irregularity from the multitude of greater incongruities shows you are grasping at straws.  Find more to read, broaden your fact checking horizon.  Start with the waivers brought to the Ethics Office.  But don't showcase petty mistakes; it reveals your laziness when the rest of America is picking up your slack.