Gen Z Funemployment and Rebranded Pensions

"shein's eating their lunch"

Khaby Lame’s directorial debut will premiere at a film festival gala hosted by Bella Thorne; The Japanese House collaborates with rumored Taylor Swift boyfriend Matty Healy on “Sunshine Baby”; and Selena Gomez is now a Food Network host (Rachael Ray for Gen Z™?).

MONTANA TO BECOME FIRST U.S. STATE TO BAN TIKTOK, cnbc
Montana Governor Greg Gianforte signed legislation to ban TikTok from operating in the state to protect residents from alleged intelligence gathering by China, making it the first U.S. state to ban the app. Montana will make it unlawful for Google and Apple’s app stores to offer TikTok within the state, but will not impose any penalties on individuals using the app. This doesn’t really mean a whole lot, since this kind of thing is so hard to enforce, but it feels like a pretty powerful signal.

TIKTOKERS' GROWING INTEREST IN UPPER EAST SIDE STYLE, elle
The newest tastemakers on TikTok: the impeccably dressed, coiffed women of New York City’s Upper East Side. Explains Joshua Kamei, creator of the suddenly-everywhere account @LadiesOfMadisonAvenue, “They share a sense of pride in putting themselves together in the way they want to be viewed and to show respect to the places and people they patron.” What this article doesn’t say is that they are also very, very rich.

GEN Z'S SHOPPING LIST: POLITE ROBOTS AND CASH-FREE CHECKOUT, mediapost
According to new research from Klarna, 26% of these consumers are convinced that shopping will be so customized and AI-driven “that they will no longer have to do the shopping at all if they don’t want to.” Further, 81% of Gen Z and millennials expect augmented reality to enhance in-store shopping, and 59% say they are generally open to robotic sales help taking measurements and offering style advice.

SALES SLUMP AS BOOHOO AND ASOS MAKE DIFFERENT CALLS ON U.S. MARKET, forbes
This week fast fashion darling Boohoo.com reported that it had dived almost $113 million into the red, while Asos revealed it had fallen nearly $363 million. Blame it on “Shein eating their lunch, pre-owned fashion marketplaces like Depop and Vinted becoming increasingly influential, or customers slipping off the sweatpants and heading back to Main Street.”

AARP IS RECRUITING GEN Z IN AN UNCONVENTIONAL WAY—WITH A PENSION: WE TELL THEM IT’S ‘FREE MONEY’, fortune
In 2019, just 14% of Fortune 500 companies offered a pension to new hires, down from 59% among the same group of employers back in 1998. Last year, just a quarter of civilian workers were offered a traditional pension plan — and AARP is one of them, positioning it to Gen Z hires as “free money.” (I’m embarrassed to admit that everything I know about pensions I learned from The Wire.)

FOR GEN Z, UNEMPLOYMENT CAN BE A BLAST, wsj
This op-ed, written by a “regular old, capitalist Boomer gal teaching bright and shiny young M.B.A. students,” seems to think her Gen Z students invented the concept of funemployment and WSJ editors let her write an entire essay about it?

Since I first heard about funemployment in class, I have been testing it out on everyone I meet. Gen Zers I know have received my queries with bemusement. Funemployment is so much a part of the vernacular, how could I not know about it? Don’t get all worked up about it either, they said—no one wants to stay unemployed forever. I made a point as well to seek out a few students who I knew were on scholarship. How, I asked them, are people affording funemployment? I was met with shrugs. “You just do,” I was told. My children and their friends, milliennials mostly in midlevel corporate jobs, also shrugged off my amazement. To a person, they were familiar with the term, but with a bit of eye-rolling. My daughter’s 30-something friend observed, “I think Gen Z might be hiding this from you all. Clever.”

One last thought: