WikiCommons/Jeff Boyce
- Millennials have been accused of killing dozens of industries including fast-casual restaurants, napkins, golf, and beer.
- Baby boomers — the name given to the generation born after World War II — are credited with ushering in lots of political and social change.
- And with those changes, some industries faded out and eventually died.
- We've rounded up a list of industries that fell out of popularity when baby boomers were the age that millennials are now.
It's no secret that millennials have brought about significant change in recent years, but what about their predecessors?
We decided to give millennials a break and investigate the baby boomer generation. Baby boomers are defined by the US Census Bureau as those born in the years following World War II, from 1946 to 1964.
For the purpose of this exercise, we looked at the period during which the boomers entered the workforce, between 1970 and 1990.
"The boomers are rightly remembered for ushering in a lot of political and social change," Paul Taylor, a former executive vice president of Pew Research Center and author of "The Next America," told Business Insider.
But, the number of industries that died out during that period is "not the same level of magnitude," as today, he said.
"Ultimately it is not really generations — it's technology that is the source of these changes," Taylor added.
Even so, as baby boomers grew older, Americans started eating more fast food, using computers instead of typewriters, and shopping at big-box stores such as Walmart.
As a result, some major industries and products were phased out:
Five-and-dime stores
Yelp/TheWalmartMuseum
Before Walmart existed, five-and-dime stores selling inexpensive household and personal products were the place to shop.
The original five-cents discount store was opened by Frank Woolworth in Upstate New York in 1879. This grew into the Woolworth store empire, which boomed in the wake of the Great Depression.
Eventually, these died out after big-box stores such as Walmart and Target took over in the 1970s. In 1999, Woolworth closed its final 400 stores.
Typewriters
Flickr / Szabolcs
Typewriters became common in offices in the 1980s and were critical to opening the doors to women in the workplace. The early machines paved the way for electronic versions, which were ultimately replaced by computers.
The first widely used personal computer was launched by IBM in 1981 and cost $ 1,565. The PC was named “Machine of the Year” by Time magazine in 1982.
One of the grandfathers of the typewriter movement, Smith Corona Corporation, filed for bankruptcy in 1995.
Cassette tapes
Shutterstock/Ensuper
Cassette tapes took off in 1979, the year that the Sony Walkman was invented. These portable devices enabled consumers to listen to music on the go.
In the early ’90s, they started to fade out as CDs became popular. In 1991, sales of CDs overtook cassettes – total global shipments of CDs surpassed one billion in 1992 and two billion in 1996, according to Statista.
Sales of portable tape players have steadily declined since then – from 18 million in 1994 to 480,000 in 2007, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
See Also:
- These are the 25 brands that millennials love the most
- Costco replaced a beloved food-court menu item with new vegan options. Here’s how they taste.
- These before-and-after photos show how much fast food has changed over the years
