We’re in a breezy Boston café, but it could be Every Coffee Shop, 2010, glancing around at the college juniors, recent retirees, and twenty of America’s 22 million cubeless workers.
Judging by the many rumpled Wall Street Journals and Boston Globes, they look well informed. We notice at least one laptop per table, beaming into the transfixed eyes of its owner. They reflect two habits of Us, 2010: We sip coffee and guzzle information.
These coffee klatchers are in the know, another passion of our time. We have to know—first, if possible. In the age of information, not knowing is a form of not belonging.
These Bostonians are the products of decades of trends in the United States. We have tracked these trends, wondering where they will take us. But looking around this coffee shop, what do we see?
We see men in polo shirts, button-down long-sleeved shirts, khakis and jeans. We see Adidas and Puma running shoes, leather loafers, and crew neck sweaters.
In 1964, what would we have seen? Polo shirts, button-down long-sleeved shirts, khakis and jeans, Adidas and Puma running shoes, leather loafers, and crew neck sweaters.
A teenaged boy pulls up in a Mustang wearing Fred Perry tennis shorts; the fellows heading to work sport two- and three-button suits and black and brown lace-up shoes; to ward off the sun, four people are wearing Ray-Bans. It is déjà vu 1964 but with fewer silk ties.
This is where our trends have taken us: forward to our past.
In the 1970s and 1980s, we stood in line for American Graffiti and made Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, set in the 1950s and 1960s, our hit television shows. Thirty years later, we return to a time most of us regret: the 1970s.
Austin Powers reprises and spoofs the Bond and spy films.
VW introduces the Beetle, this time with a flower vase on the dashboard.
Chrysler introduces a car that looks like the cruisers that protected Al Capone’s gang as they pillaged Chicago in the 1930s.
Bell-bottoms come, go, and return, with hip-huggers close behind.
The Globe entertainment section notes that 2009’s number-one-grossing concert of 2009 was Britney Spears’. It doesn’t mention that 1999’s was Britney Spears’, too. AC/DC and Metallica are in town, Korn seems perennial, and the Rolling Stones, gathering moss as they near seventy, are this decade’s top-grossing band. The Rolling Stones? At seventy-three, Tina Turner announces her final final last final tour.
Once there was hip-hop. Most of us think it’s new. But hip-hop came, declined, then returned: instant retro hip-hop.
In the 1950s, futurists made us confident that by 2000, we would be wearing jumpsuits and jet-packing through the skies to work. Downtowns would be car-, slum-, and beggar-free. The Jetsons showed that our rooms would be stripped of everything but the essentials, that robots would vacuum our floors, and that we often would wear space helmets. Our clothing would be free of buttons, perfectly fitted, and ready to fly. In 1968, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey envisioned regularly scheduled passenger space travel; it’s still not here.
In Epcot-like fantasies, we were shown the car of 2000. It still has not arrived. Car sound systems, however, work much better, featuring more speakers than anyone used to own in an entire house.
How much have we changed? Our electric power, ships, and planes are driven by technologies that are 130, 110, and 80 years old, respectively. Television is nearing hundred years old, and the truly transformative technologies of refrigeration, air conditioning, and indoor plumbing are almost as old or older.
These innovations come, and we overestimate their disruptiveness. We were told television would kill radio and movies and that TiVo would kill television. They all flourish. We were told that the Internet would kill print. In 1970, 174.5 million people subscribed to magazines; in 2008, the number reached 324.8 million. In this Boston coffee shop at 2:50 p.m., we can scan the room and count: Seven people are working on computers, four of them are on the Internet, and five people are reading today’s Boston Globe.
Some trend spotters assure us that social networking sites like Twitter will transform our lives and the marketing of products. Coors, Panera, Ray-Ban, Pampers, Domino’s, and BMW all set up Twitter sites, and as of this writing, their total number of followers exactly equals the population of Bisbee, Arizona.
If there are so many trends, why are we still the way we were? If we are changing so much, why is it so hard to tell?
On June 10, 2007, the New York Times reported another new trend: the decline in the online sales of products. Here was its evidence for the decline:
Forrester Research, a market research company, projects that online book sales will rise 11 percent this year, compared with nearly 40 percent last year. Apparel sales, which increased 61 percent last year, are expected to slow to 21 percent. And sales of pet supplies are on pace to rise 30 percent this year after climbing 81 percent last year.
This story is a trick. Let’s start over and put on our own reporter’s glasses and decide the actual trend was the continued growth of online sales. We could take the exact same data and write:
Sales in all online categories are up, well ahead of sales trends in the general retail market. Online book sales are expected to rise 11 percent this year, after rising 40 percent last year. Apparel sales in stores are up 3 percent but have soared 21 percent online. And pet supplies are the big winner: They’re up 30 percent this year—six times the increase in sales in retail outlets.
Why didn’t the Times report that story? Money and fame. The three biggest stories in journalism of the past thirty years hint at that: Janet Cooke of the Washington Post winning a 1981 Pulitzer Prize for the riveting story of an eight-year-old heroin addict; Stephen Glass winning fans and the adoration of his fellow New Republic editors and writers with his captivating stories between 1995 and 1998, a story itself so compelling that it was made into the movie Shattered Glass; Patricia Smith of the Boston Globe being named a 1998 Pulitzer Prize finalist for column writing.
A thread runs through those three writers’ stories: They were fabricated. The writers’ ambitions to write award-winning and career-making stories overcame their appreciation for the truth. But that temptation surrounds every media outlet today, posing the question of this decade: How do we get eyeballs?
We see the temptation in this New York Times story, too. The writer didn’t write “Online Sales Continue to Grow” because that wouldn’t be big news; it would merely continue an old trend. Newspapers must write news; no news, no eyeballs. So as Cooke, Glass, and Smith did, the headline writers and reporters succumb to temptation.
Even august-sounding publications like the Harvard Business Review feel this urge. We see this vividly in its feature “The 20 Breakthrough Ideas of 2005.”
The first surprise: There were twenty huge ideas that year. Have we had twenty in this decade?
Our suspicions deepen when we scan the too-clever headlines for the ideas: “The Velcro Organization,” “Everyone into the Gene Pool,” and “Blog-Trolling in the Bitstream.” But it is the Harvard Business Review, so we assume it’s credible, maybe even definitive. So we start with “The Velcro Organization.” Here’s its big idea as summarized by HBR’s editors:
When your customers are located around the world, it’s not enough to have effective, efficient functions. You also need to know the people and relationships that work in particular locales.
Okay, we say: only nineteen Big Ideas.
Big Idea #17 advocates midcareer sabbaticals for workers, to reenergize them and their companies. Many readers in large companies have heard this idea for years, often from their own lips.
The editors save their remarkable best for last: It’s Big Idea #20, and it must rank among the truly ironic ideas of 2005 and beyond, given its context in this article on the 20 Big New Ideas:
“Be skeptical of anything touted as ‘new.’ ”
Everyone reports trends because we love to read about them. Why? We are optimists, and optimists believe in change. We believe that in every day and in every way, we are getting better. That belief has created entire industries to satisfy our appetite.
But the media’s reporting of nontrends finally irritated one writer so much that he decided to expose it. In August 2003, Slate magazine and Jack Shafer began a regular feature with the perfect title: “Bogus Trend of the Week Award.”
Bogus Trend began with a report on the “decline” in online sales, followed by reports on nontrends including eating locally grown food (supported entirely by anecdotes from people found buying locally grown items in stores); men who own cats; booming evangelical attendance (it wasn’t happening); a purported trend among people leaving areas threatened by global warming; and increases in shoplifting, a “trend” apparently planted by retailers to make shoplifters more afraid of the legal consequences, among many others.
Are there real trends afoot? If there are, the false ones outnumber them, as this Boston coffee shop reveals. The old saw remains true: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
And the more we want to see trends, the more we will hear about them—whether they exist or not.
Today’s smart marketers realize that most trends are small: blue being the new black, for example. They also know something else; once we spot even a small trend, we’re too late. These marketers have a term for it: That tiny trend already is “post peak.”
These marketers also know that these tiny trends come and go, but humans barely change over centuries. Like the Neanderthals, we still wear makeup and prefer tools that look good; yesterday’s lovely hand ax is today’s OXO can opener. Our loves don’t change, and the best marketers know that. So they don’t follow trends; like us, they follow our hearts.