Jul
7
Last week on behalf of The Economist, this is how some hapless tweet writer boiled down an observation about flagging diamond sales:
Why aren’t millennials buying diamonds?
The tweet earned a spate of delightfully sarcastic replies from affronted Millennials. Many of the comments—dare I say some of the best?—were NSFW, so I won’t be including them here. (If you cannot resist, you can read them here, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.) Meanwhile, here are some of the more tame reactions:
maybe because they’re burdened with crippling student loan debt and can’t actually find a good paying job
I work at a grocery store
“Why aren’t millennials buying diamonds” she read as she ate crackers to quiet the hunger & wondered if she’d have a place to live come fall
You’ve gotta be kidding, @TheEconomist! The answer’s in the name of your publication! We’re all poor! [slits throat]
If millennials were buying diamonds then the articles would be why millennials are wasting money on diamonds when they can’t get jobs
If only the fateful tweet had more soberly attempted to win click-throughs to The Economist’s interesting, offense-free link. Diamond sales are a matter of interest at the very least, and quite possibly a matter of concern. In the chaotic system that a world economy is, you never know which industry will turn out to be a butterfly whose wings lead to a hurricane. Moreover, the trend may reveal insights about the shifting and morphing of societal values.
There is something to be said for sensitivity to the viewpoint of various generations. Millennials have fast-rising purchasing power, the above protestations of poverty notwithstanding, so it pays to know how to communicate with them, and how not to.
Last year, Inc. magazine ran an article entitled “15 Words and Phrases Millennials Use but No One Else Understands.” How many can you correctly define? A few were lost on me, and I’m a borderline Millennial myself. Maybe I’m not as young as I prefer to think.