Brilio.net/en - In his famous novel Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh wrote: Choose life. Choose job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. This statement used to be the reality in 1993 but is no longer accurate anymore. According to a recent study conducted by a worldwide famous financial magazine, the new thing people want to buy is happiness. The youth of today in particular, prefers the enrichment in experiences instead of buying a nice car or flat-screen television and slowly, they are shifting little by little the all global economy to a brand new one.
This generation called millennial, was born between the 80s and 2000 and has nothing to do with the previous one. Born in the middle of financial crisis, raised with a bitter taste of disillusionment, the millennial decided to build a system of values opposite to his eldest one, which used to be thought of as dogma. An online marketplace for ticket sales, showed 78 percent of millennials would rather pay for an experience than material goods. That compares with 59 percent for the baby boomers generation, which was born between the 50s and the middle of the 70s. Another example: Nielsens data show six-in-10 millennials go out to eat at least once a week, twice the percentage of baby boomers.
Traveling, going to concerts, eating in restaurants: the millennials generation gives priority to services instead of the purchase of goods and so starts to evidently modify the economy. Those modifications have been detected by the website Bloomberg: they analysed the stock exchange results of over six hundred European companies between 2011 and 2016 using the Stoxx 6OO index. The result of this analyse shows that there was a growing gap between the experience providers, that is to say the companies specialized in services such as leisure and travel, and the good providers (companies selling consumer commodity).
As highlighted by Bloomberg, one of the consequences of this change of tendency is the decrease in savings. Instead of saving money, the millennial generation prefers to spend it: according to a recent survey, only 34% of the millennials worldwide consider that they saved enough money over the past months. The 66% remaining seems not to worry too much about it and call themselves the YOLO generation.
The victims of this irrepressible wish for freedom are without any doubts the real estate and the car industry. Sharing has now become a common and accepted way of living: when 30% of the young Europeans aged 25-34 are living together with their parents, a great majority lives in shared apartments. The long path to become an owner is indeed less and less considered by this generation, which prefers to resort to carpooling rather than buying his own car.
As a reminder, the millennial generation is also facing historical difficulties regarding employment and professional perspectives. Nothing better than a great concert to forget for a moment about an unpredictable future!
Source: bloomberg
(Reported byCelia Tholozan)