By Jon Berry

What do you get for a car that’s gone the extra mile for you? How about a trip to the car wash and replacing its missing hub cap?

Last week our 1998 Toyota Camry turned 175,000 miles. Fittingly the milestone came on a trip to the grocery store. While this mild-mannered sedan no doubt has daydreamed of lighting out for the frontier for a Blue Highways adventure, its reality has been more George Bailey than William Least Heat Moon.

There have been a lot of trips to the store in this car. And commutes to work. Drives to school. And to the movies. The odometer may evoke adventure – 175,000 miles is equal to 60 drives across the country. But the furthest West this car has been is trips to my parents’ farm in Indiana.

This has been a family car. It’s been through two kids growing up and going off into the world; two dogs (note the chew marks on the rear-seat seatbelts); family vacations to the beach (sand in the trunk); Christmas trees (pine needles); and trips to college (amazing how much can be crammed into defined spaces).

We still have a ways to go to catch up with the Depression generation. I am reminded of this every time I travel out to Indiana to visit my Dad, go into my Dad’s barn, and see his two tractors – a shiny red 1940s International Harvester and his “newer” model, a shiny blue early-1960s Ford. Add one more reason to hang onto the 175,000-mile Camry – to see how its story turns out.

David Crosbie (29) never identified himself with a ‘generation’, until now. What could have brought about this revelation?

By David Crosbie

Generational marketing has a long history in the US, but is not so prevalent in the UK, or indeed many other markets around the world. Instead, over here people tend to talk about age bands and socio-economic groups, with phrases such as “25-34 year old ABC1s” being bandied around by media sellers and marketers.

One reason for this is that Britain is still a class-obsessed society. As a Russian colleague once said to me when discussing social classifications, “in Russia we do not have anything like your Cockneys.” Another might be that, on the whole, Brits tend not to think about themselves as part of a cohort group born around the same time. I myself might occasionally muse that I am a ‘child of the Eighties’, or one of ‘Thatcher’s children’, but even that is only to excuse my penchant for the Human League and Eurythmics.

All that changed the other week, however, when I picked up a Sunday supplement (The Observer Magazine, 31 January 2010) and was confronted by a contemporary of mine claiming that he (and by inference me) was part of ‘The Lost Generation’. He argued that it is today’s twentysomethings who are paying the price for the excesses of the baby boom generation, with its free higher education, affordable housing and abundance of cheap credit. We, by contrast, have to contend with thousands of pounds of student debt, saving for deposits on extortionately priced housing and the mess that ensued when the credit bubble burst.

I have to say this is a view that resonated with me. At a time in my life when I should be thinking about going forth and multiplying, I’m worrying about student loan repayments, how to get on the housing ladder and how best to care for elderly relatives. These are of course all concerns that are shared with many consumers around the globe. But is it just a case of sour grapes on the part of a generation that is in fact not that badly off but likes a good moan?

Well interestingly, it’s not just people in their late twenties who are coming to recognise this issue. A leading light in the UK Conservative Party, which is widely tipped to win the country’s imminent elections, has just written a book entitled The Pinch, which explains how, “the baby boomers took their children’s future.” As well as being a baby boomer himself, the author, David Willetts, is viewed as being such a great thinker that he has earned the soubriquet, “Two Brains”.

At GfK Roper Consulting, we examine closely how evolving consumer concerns and needs manifest themselves in changing attitudes and behaviours, and generational and cohort breakdowns by market are key filters for our analyses. A major client study on global baby boomers we carried out last year shed new light on how this generation will differ from today’s over 65s as they enter retirement. I for one will be examining this year’s data carefully to see how my contemporaries around the world are feeling about the challenges we face. If only my question on attitudes to Eighties synth pop had made the final questionnaire…

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As Americans seek self-reliance, more is also required of them

By John Bishop

Perhaps this might sound a little like an insurance commercial, but so be it. When the unexpected happens, you never know who will be on hand to help. The odds are it will not be a trained professional, but maybe that is okay. The more willing we are to accept this notion, the more prepared we will be to react.

Inclement weather, medical emergencies, transportation accidents, natural disasters and even terrorist attacks all require the services and expertise of first responders to help those in need.  Yet, in most cases those first responders are often everyday citizens. Certainly, the frequency of the public being thrust into these situations seems to be increasing.
 
No doubt, when such situations arise, the professionals who would respond first are not typically on the scene at the moment of impact to provide their services immediately. As the effects of budget cuts across the US in state and local government take hold, the scope of these services has been reduced in many cases.
 
The following is an excerpt from a New York Times article on January 8th:
 
“In Kansas, state workers are no longer plowing for a perfectly clear path on weekends or after business hours, except on Interstate highways. “Our budgets have been cut, and people will notice it on the highways this year,” said Steve Swartz, a spokesman for the state’s Transportation Department. “In years past, we’d continue to pay our operators until we got down to bare pavement everywhere, at all times.””
 
Such problems are compounded by the shrinkage of emergency personnel in some police, EMT, and fire departments as they are forced to make difficult choices as to where cutbacks should take place in the face of local budget crises. In states facing harsh winter weather, clearing snow from public roads may be relegated to those private citizens with their personal vehicles. An altruistic deed to be sure, as citizens take matters into their own hands for the greater good of their communities. Yet, with fewer regulations and less experience, room for accidents and errors only increases.
 
That said, often the good Samaritans in the crowd have skills and experience that can help them pitch in, and even save lives. An elementary school classmate of mine, Dr. Tolani, teamed up with a police officer on a subway last year to essentially bring a fellow passenger back to life.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/fashion/08GENB.html
 
Since 9/11, citizens have always wondered how they can pitch in, yet there has been no real call to action. Many have taken the onus upon themselves to put their skills and empathy to work both here and abroad. Consider the lack of government help that was available to the people in Haiti during the aftermath of the recent earthquake. In many cases, the first external responders were foreign news reporters. Who can forget the images of Sanjay Gupta and Anderson Cooper pitching in to help those injured.
 
Domestically, we see that a growing numbers of Americans, 48% (12 points higher than 2007), feel they “don’t have control over government or business making changes to your community”. For all that, the myriad of challenges Americans have faced in the past two years has increased resilience and self-reliance.
 
In April, AP-GfK poll respondent, Dwight Hageman, a retiree from Newberg Oregon stated “I think people are beginning to realize that there’s not always going to be someone to catch them when things fall down.”
 
It seems that this role of pitching-in to help one’s self and one’s fellow citizens has partially come out of a sense of responsibility, but also a growing sense of necessity. As I entered the security checkpoint at Midwestern airport just 3 days after the failed Christmas day bombing of the Delta flight over Detroit, the TSA agent reminded me and my fellow passengers: “If you see someone trying to light anything, beat them up – if you’ve got it in you. Protect yourself.”
 
Consider that terrorist attacks on at least 5 different commercial flights have been thwarted by airline passengers. Says Amanda Ripley in a recent Time article:
 
“And yet our collective response to this legacy of ass-kicking is puzzling. Each time, we build a slapdash pedestal for the heroes. And since regular people will always be first on the scene of terrorist attacks, we should perhaps prioritize the public’s antiterrorism capability.”
 
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1950576,00.html#ixzz0cL0lSwk0
 
Could it be that the government is not asking enough of its citizens? Certainly the economic collapse has been a wake-up call for all individuals in this country as we have seen with the recent shift towards personal responsibility and self-reliance. Yet, those concepts seem to be in direct conflict with the system that has been established in this country over the past several decades.
 
We have come a long way since the ride of Paul Revere and the rallying of colonial militia Minutemen, but the fundamental ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ mentality is still alive and well, now more than ever. We now know well that there are threats, natural and manmade which are bound to lead to things going wrong – often unexpectedly. While preparation and self-reliance are just good sound individual practices, state and local governments may be sitting on great untapped potential if organized in an effective manner.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/worst_case_scenarios/

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