"Do you take Apple Pay?" a customer asked. A young Black woman in all-black Spandex, she was holding a pair of white leather roller skates, the old fashioned kind with 4 wheels each.
I told her we didn't, and she put the skates back--she had no other way of paying the ten dollars they cost.
"Uh, wait," I said. "Let me just double check. We got a new cash resister last year."
Yes, it takes Apple Pay! She bought the skates.
I'm glad I double-checked my assumption.
Most of my coworkers are over forty, and I'm well aware I am out of the loop, culturally. I'm even wondering if I should stay on Instagram (my account deletion becomes permanent in a week) to stay aware of some of the changes.
I don't need to be hip (ha, too late for that), but I'm interested in following the shifts in culture just because they're fascinating. Living history!
Sometimes they're predictable, flowing from new attitudes to gender, sexuality, monogamy; sometimes they're unexpected shifts arising from new technology . . . or, who knows what.
For instance, the person who'd said that Coco wasn't subtitled, ascribed it to Americans not liking subtitles.
But, I had just read an article about how most Gen Zs (and a lot of the rest of us) watch media with subtitles ON. They (we) are watching on their phones, and the sound is maybe off or not that reliably good.
I've noticed that on TikToks and IG reels---subtitles are often automatic, and they're often a visually pleasing design.
So, yeah, my American baby boomer generation didn't generally like subtitles, or need them--but that's no longer true.
Hey, a lot of us have hearing loss now!
(And Pixar did subtitle Coco.)
It's never safe to make assumptions, but once we're over a certain age, don't you find that we massively do not know what we're talking about, culturally?And the Gen Zs (or older) don’t know or care about our references—people have told me they don’t know who the Beatles are; and religion is entirely irrelevant to a lot of young people I meet. It registers so little they don’t even object to it.
And now I have to leave early for work---the police are coming to talk to us about shoplifting---an increasing (and physically dangerous) problem at the store.
