Young Consumers Pinch Their Pennies

Millennials were supposed to be the next golden ticket for retailers. A cohort of 70 million consumers roughly between the ages of 18 and 34, this was the first generation of Americans to grow up with cell phones and the Web. Marketers could reach them in myriad ways—tweets, Facebook pages—that were unavailable when their boomer parents started out. “Marketers thought, ‘Here come the Millennials, we’re going to have an awesome time selling to them,’” says Max Lenderman, a director at ad agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky. “They were waiting for a boom. Then comes the financial crisis, and all of a sudden the door has almost slammed in their face.”

No group was hit harder by the Great Recession than the Millennials. Their careers are stalled. They hold record levels of education debt. And an estimated 24 percent have had to move back home with parents at least once, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Almost a quarter of them describe lives of financial desperation, reports researcher WSL Strategic Retail. “It’s a culture shock because this generation has grown up entitled,” says Wendy Liebmann, WSL’s chief executive officer.