Tag Archives: Millennials

Birth rates plunging and those between 26 and 35 not sure they want kids: This is what happens to a society when marriage and family are discouraged

Important Takeaways:

  • Childless Future? Birth Rate Plunging as Millennials Decide Against Being Parents
  • Less than a fifth of millennials, specifically those between 26 and 35, are certain that they want to become parents one day. This inclination further diminishes among individuals with pronounced environmental concerns. Simply put, four in five young millennials want to remain childless, especially if they dwell on climate change concerns.
  • The study, conducted by the University of Southampton and the Generations and Gender Program, gathered insights on attitudes toward children, family, and various political issues. It involved a sample of 7,000 individuals ranging from 18 to 59 years-old in the U.K.

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Cheap old homes draw millennials escaping pandemic cages

By Daniel Fastenberg

NORWICH, Conn. (Reuters) – American millennials with budget constraints are breaking out of their pandemic coops to find affordable dream homes in far-flung places.

For funeral home director Kate Reinhart, from Utah, that dream is an octagonal Victorian that recalls the macabre Addams Family mansion seen in cartoons, films and a TV series.

It helped that her scientist husband Cameron found his first job near Norwich, Connecticut, a town with one of the largest concentrations of 18th- and early 19th-century houses in New England.

For just $85,000 the couple bought the 1885 house replete with stained glass, artisanal light fixtures and winding banisters. They plan to put some $100,000 into a massive renovation.

“I do feel like we appreciate it more now during the pandemic to have more space to ourselves,” Kate said. “People are more self-conscious about being on top of each other in tiny apartment buildings. In New York City, people are fleeing to here.”

The trend is clear from visits to CheapOldHouses, a website founded by Elizabeth Finkelstein in 2016 to promote the purchase and preservation of historical houses.

Followers of the site’s Instagram account have steadily doubled every week since U.S. pandemic lockdowns began in March, to about 20,000, she said. About 42% are aged 25-34, and about 75% are women.

“The mantra of real estate has always been ‘location, location, location.’ For the first time that’s being flipped a little bit on its head,” Finkelstein said. “We are living in a time when people are willing to kind of take risks, maybe risks that they’ve been wanting to take their whole life.”

Homes on CheapOldHouses.com tend to be in the U.S. Midwest, South and Rust Belt, where many sell for less than $100,000. Houses that cost more in North America, Europe and elsewhere are also listed in Finkelstein’s monthly newsletter.

“We feature homes people can realistically buy, but also use their hands on as opposed to sitting in a cubicle all day long,” she said.

A net 70,000 people left the New York metropolitan region in 2020, resulting in roughly $34 billion in lost income, estimated Unacast, a location analytics provider.

More millennials may leave big cities even after the pandemic is over, Finkelstein said.

“With so many offices going remote, people have more opportunity to just say, ‘maybe I don’t need to be paying more than half my income in rent. And I can, I can take that leap.'”

(Reporting by Reuters Television; Writing by Richard Chang; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)

Negative tone of White House race sours young voters

Millenials see President Obama speak

By Scott Malone

BOSTON (Reuters) – The exceptionally negative tone of this year’s race for the White House is souring young Americans, turning some away from the democratic process just as the millennial generation has become as large a potential bloc of voters as the baby boomers.

Reuters/Ipsos polling shows that Americans aged 18 to 34 are slightly less likely to vote for president this year than their comparably aged peers were in 2012. Some political scientists worry that this election could scar a generation of voters, making them less likely to cast ballots in the future.

Young Americans on the left and right have found reasons to be dissatisfied with their choices this year. Senator Bernie Sanders had an enthusiastic following of younger people before he lost the Democratic primary race to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. On the Republican side, some are unwilling to vote for Donald Trump, citing the New York businessman’s sometimes insulting rhetoric on women, minorities and immigrants.

Brandon Epstein, who turned 18 on Monday, had looked forward earlier in the year to casting his first vote for Sanders. Now, the resident of suburban Suffolk County, New York, plans to sit out the vote on Election Day, Nov. 8.

“It’s because of the selection of the candidates. I find them to be not just sub-par, but unusually sub-par,” said Epstein, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Something’s gone terribly wrong.”

That sentiment is broadly reflected in poll data that show that young Americans are less enthusiastic about their choices in November than they were four years ago when Democratic President Barack Obama faced a re-election challenge from Republican Mitt Romney.

Some 52.2 percent of respondents aged 18 to 34 told Reuters/Ipsos they were certain or almost certain to vote, compared with 56.1 percent who reported that level of certainty at the same point in 2012.

The national tracking poll was conducted online in English in all 50 states. It included 3,088 people between 18-34 years old who took the survey from Oct. 1 to Oct. 17, and 2,141 18-34 year olds who took the poll on the same days in 2012. It has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 2 percentage points for both groups.

‘DEEP CYNICISM’

For at least the past half century, young Americans have voted at lower rates than their elders. But this year’s decline in enthusiasm is of particular concern because it comes as the millennial generation – people born from 1981 through 1997 – has become as large a bloc of eligible voters as the baby boomers – born between 1946 and 1964. Each group’s number of eligible voters is approaching 70 million people, according to the Pew Research Center.

“This generation has never trusted the government, Wall Street or the media less,” John Della Volpe, director of polling at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, said of the millennials. “That’s likely to result in turnout of less than 50 percent and of those who do turn out, there is still a deep cynicism regarding the impact of their vote, whether or not it will make a difference.”

The projected low turnout is a particular concern given recent research showing how important habit is in encouraging voter participation. Put simply, a person who votes in one election is about 10 percent more likely to vote in the next than an eligible voter who opted to stay home, said Alexander Coppock, an assistant professor of political science at Yale University.

“If you extend that logic, if you have an election that fails to turn people on to voting, you’d expect that you wouldn’t get that cumulative effect,” said Coppock, whose article “Is Voting Habit Forming?” was published in this month’s issue of the American Journal for Political Science.

However, not all young voters unhappy with their choices will be staying home. Some plan to cast a ballot anyway, even if only in protest, rather than sitting out.

That group includes Cameron Khansarinia, a 20-year-old vice president of the Harvard Republican Club, who said he would cast a ballot even though he opposed Trump.

“I will definitely vote, I just don’t know if I will be writing someone in or voting for (Libertarian) Gary Johnson or even voting for Hillary Clinton when it gets down to it,” said Khansarinia, who is registered to vote in heavily Democratic California. “Once this is over, come Nov. 9, we will need people here to rebuild the party.”

(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Frances Kerry)

Guess who’s shopping at dollar stores? Well-to-do millennials

Dollar Tree Sign

By Sruthi Ramakrishnan and Siddharth Cavale

(Reuters) – Victoria Marin, a 35-year old author and educator, used to spend hundreds of dollars at large party-goods retailers on supplies that ended up in the trash can.

But a visit to the neighborhood Dollar General store, mainly to stock up on cheaper paper napkins and plastic cups, completely changed the way she shopped.

She realized the store was more like a small supermarket, where she could buy groceries, Christmas decorations and even apparel at much cheaper prices than at a Walmart or a Shop Rite.

Marin, whose gross annual family income is about $150,000, said she would initially feel awkward about shopping at dollar stores.

That perception, however, changed in the past few years for thousands of shoppers like her as a shaky economy added a good dose of prudence to household budgets.

“As years passed and my family grew, I realized I could buy the same items at a dollar store for a fraction of the price,” said Marin, whose family of six lives in upstate New York.

Marin is among a growing band of affluent millennials who prefer spending less on everyday stuff and splurging on big-ticket items like cars and homes.

They do not need to shop at dollar stores, which sell products mostly priced between $1 and $10, but are increasingly choosing to do so, a move that is reshaping the fortunes of many retailers.

There is no fixed definition for millennials, but experts usually define the term as referring to those born between 1980 and 2000.

Dollar General Corp, the second-largest dollar store chain after Dollar Tree, called out this demographic as a key contributor to its revenue in its post-earnings call last month.

Of the millennials who shopped at Dollar General, Dollar Tree and Dollar Tree-owned Family Dollar stores, in the year ended April, about 29 percent earned over $100,000 a year and accounted for about a quarter of sales at these stores, according to market researcher NPD’s Checkout Tracking, which tracks consumer receipts.

Dollar stores have worked hard to shed the image that they cater to lower-income groups and have invested in retaining customers who traded down from big retail stores after the recession.

Stocking a wider variety of consumables, beauty products and over-the-counter drugs, the interiors of dollar stores now look very much like a Walmart or Target store.

“I get a lot of toiletries (at Dollar Tree), and those aren’t always name brands,” said Eric Brantner, a 33-year-old freelance copywriter who lives in Houston and makes roughly $100,000 a year.

“For instance, the cotton swabs aren’t Q-Tips, but they work just as well and are less than half the price.”

Also, the number of dollar stores has grown rapidly in the last few years, often making them the nearest store in cities as well as small towns.

Dollar General operates more than 12,700 stores in the United States, while Dollar Tree operates about 14,000 stores in the United States and Canada.

Nielsen data shows that the number of heads of households under the age of 35 years who shop at dollar stores and earn more than $100,000 a year rose 7.1 percent between 2012 and 2015, versus a 3.6 percent increase at all retail stores.

Dollar General and Dollar Tree both reported profits above analysts’ expectations for the latest quarter, in contrast with weak profits at department stores such as Macy’s Inc and Target.

Dollar General said millennials contributed about 24 percent to its first-quarter revenue. This included mid and lower-income millennials as well.

Dollar General and Dollar Tree declined to comment beyond what they have said publicly.

(Reporting by Sruthi Ramakrishnan and Siddharth Cavale in Bengaluru; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)