Millennials are just as into buying stuff as their boomer parents.
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The Lede
While 28- to 43-year-olds have yet to shake their association with less-is-more living, that old stereotype doesn't quite stand up to scrutiny anymore. Consumer-spending data suggests they have no trouble dropping their hard-earned cash on goods and services. As they've built careers and started families, their buying habits increasingly resemble those of Gen X and boomers when they were the same age. Millennials haven't been minimalists in years. In fact, they may have never been minimalists at all.
Key Details
- The minimalist-millennial myth began in the early 2010s in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
- In a 2016 Harris Poll, 78% of millennials said they would rather pay for an experience than material goods, as opposed to 59% of baby boomers.
- So if millennials aren't minimalists, what exactly are they? The question isn't how to best define millennials as consumers but whether millennials' young-adult spending was markedly different from that of prior generations.
