Never mind canned tuna – five obsolete essentials that millennials have never heard of
- A report about canned tuna sales falling because millennials don’t own can openers got some buzz this week. Isn’t this just the march of technology?
- Other things once central to human life are completely foreign to under-30s – such as floppy disks and 56k modems
Millennials are often portrayed in media in a rather disparaging way for how they’ve adapted to cultural and economic environments created by previous generations.
Older generations wag their fingers at those born in the 1980s to 2000s for exercising their decision to do things differently, because it wasn’t how things were done “back in my day”.
Just this week, for example, there was a lot of buzz about a Wall Street Journal article about the canned tuna industry that alleges millennials are killing it – not because they don’t like eating fish, but because they don’t own can openers.
This raised a couple of questions. If they’re too lazy to use can openers, why are sales of fresh fish – which is much more labour-intensive to prepare – on the rise in that age group? Does the can-free generation also eschew chickpeas and San Marzano tomatoes? Maybe it’s … not about cans at all?
“Ah yes, Millennials are abandoning canned tuna because we’re lazy and not because uh, it’s gross as hell,” Jamelle Bouie, Slate’s chief political correspondent tweeted.
And BuzzFeed’s Tom Gara tweeted: “There’s only one way to get millennials eating tuna again: it needs to be in a bright white unmarked can with a single blue stripe running across the middle, sold only via online subscription for US$5 a month.”