Can We Talk?

I read an interesting post on LinkedIn the other day. A woman related how, due to an airline mix-up (imagine that!) she spent over an hour in a van with a few other passengers, being taken from one airport to another.

She engaged one young guy in conversation and learned pretty much everything about him – including the fact that he was about to graduate college and was scared about not finding a job – while, she realized at the end of the trip, he had not asked her a single thing about herself, not even her name.

If he had, she writes, he might have found her knowledge and connections useful in perhaps meeting some people who might have led him to the job opportunities he said he craved.

But this is a generation that does not prize communications. For all the connectivity we say millennials have these days, the fact is that much of that connectivity is done in solitude, alone, thumb-typing140-character messages to people around the city, the country, the world. How deep can you really get in 140 characters?

I’ve found that, in person, young people are too often standoffish, awkward, uncurious, uninterested and, especially, self-centered. I make my living interviewing people about what they do and what they know, so I’m professionally curious. I know how to draw out sources, especially to talk about themselves. But in casual or social situations with this millennial bunch, I often get grunts and truncated responses in return. People talk like they tweet.

Well, what about those young people we see all around us, constantly on their smartphones? They’re communicating, no? Not really. Those telephones, once the icons for connecting to other people, are now primarily instruments for tapping out those same abbreviated texts, or receiving them, listening to them, checking messages, surfing, or taking pointless pictures. It’s amazing how faceless Facebook really is.

In essence, they serve to isolate people even when those people are among crowds. They spend less time talking to others, more time peering at the messages in the palms of their hands.

This is relevant to this industry because we tout the brick-and-mortar aspect of retailing as a bastion of social relationship. We assure ourselves that people like to go to the store because they need to be out and among other people, exchanging information and opinions. But sometimes I wonder if that’s true.

Even in a crowded store, people move about as islands of isolation, peering into and tapping into their ever-present devices. They don’t seem to value what they could be learning by asking a question, hearing an answer, then asking a follow-up question.

You know, what we used to call “a conversation.”

As a journalist, writer, editor and commentator, Steve Kaufman has been watching the store design industry for 20 years. He has seen the business cycle through retailtainment, minimalism, category killers, big boxes, pop-ups, custom stores, global roll-outs, international sourcing, interactive kiosks, the emergence of China, the various definitions of “branding” and Amazon.com. He has reported on the rise of brand concept shops, the demise of brand concept shops and the resurgence of brand concept shops. He has been an eyewitness to the reality that nothing stays the same, except the retailer-shopper relationship.