Amex, Challenged by Chase, Is Losing the Snob War

“I don’t think it would be American Express,” one diner said. “I feel like that would be braggy, like I’m trying to prove I’m a big shot.”

.. “An Amex says you’re rich, but this says you’re interesting.”

.. Chase was succeeding by, essentially, copying the American Express playbook and chasing the same up-and-coming elites who had traditionally joined Amex’s ranks.

.. Could it be that American Express, the card that had defined ostentatious luxury and capitalist striving since the 1980s, was on the brink of becoming passé? What kinds of hoops would Amex need to jump through to attract these new hoodie-wearing moguls and young tycoons?

Was it possible .. millennials would never be convinced that income inequality was something they should aspire to?

.. For more than 30 years American Express has reaped enormous profits by telling its customers that they are successful, elite, the cream of the moneyed crop

.. people paid American Express up to $7,500 for the privilege of carrying cards that are very similar to the ones Visa and MasterCard give away free.

.. Last year, for instance, the number of American Express cards in use declined by almost 18 percent

the company’s relationships with Costco and JetBlue ..  summarily ended when those firms found alternative credit card partners.

.. Chase and Citibank, have started beating Amex at its own game, often by hiring the same executives who built Amex.

.. “They can book travel for you, they have concierges to recommend the best restaurants. If you leave your reading glasses inside a hotel room in Budapest, Amex will get them mailed back to you. No one else does that.”

.. Millennials, however, don’t really need travel agents or concierges: They have Priceline and Yelp.

.. American Express, for decades, has essentially sold snob appeal

The Chase Sapphire Reserve .. is all about emphasizing what cardholders can do, rather than what they can buy.

.. This is a card for accumulating experiences.”

.. now gives cardholders an annual $200 credit with Uber.

.. more than a third of its new cardholders last year were millennials

.. many people who work at American Express aren’t all that millennially minded themselves. If you visit Amex’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan, you’ll find squared-jawed men in bespoke suits and fashion model-glamorous women, but not a lot of young people in the uppermost ranks.

The Myth of the Millennial as Cultural Rebel

We have two popular historians to blame for our profound misunderstanding of young people’s lifestyle choices.

.. Which explanation seems more likely? Do we use Zipcar because we are ideologically committed to sharing, or because car ownership is still out of reach for a lot of people and renting piecemeal is the next best thing? Does a married couple decide to live with roommates because of our generational “openness to communal living” or because people in New York face impossible rents?
.. headlines of “Millennials are killing the X industry” could just as easily read “Millennials are locked out of the X industry.” There’s nothing like being told precarity is actually your cool lifestyle choice.
.. William Strauss and Neil Howe, a popular-historian duo, coined the term “millennial” in 1987, to refer to the children who would graduate high school in the year 2000.
.. “Every generation belongs to one of four life-cycle types that seems to repeat in the same order over time.” There are generations of prophets, followed by nomads, heroes, then artists. The G.I. generation—whom they are fond of calling “the greatest generation”—are, obviously, heroes; a so-called Silent Generation are artists; the Boomers are prophets; Gen X they deem a lost cohort of nomads; and millennials are destined to be heroes like their war-era grandparents.
.. After Strauss died in 2007, Howe continued to run LifeCourse Associates with three employees, giving about 60 speeches per year, The Chronicle for Higher Education reported in 2009. Clients include big media companies (CNN, Hearst), universities, the U.S. Army, and companies like Ford and PepsiCo. In April 2015, LifeCourse Associates prepared a report for the Congressional Institute on how the GOP could best connect with millennials voters, whom they were still calling “special,” “sheltered,” “teamworking,” and “confident.” In business as well as government, we’re deeply invested in a view of today’s young adults that was formulated before they even grew up.
.. The authors of Millennials Rising were what you might call self-hating Boomers. They hoped for a new generation that would rescue society from the excesses of their own.
.. As the support for Bernie Sanders this election cycle has shown, young people want to see a reckoning with precarity and inequality. The myth that underemployed, poorly housed young people are joyfully engaged in a project of creative destruction misrepresents our economic reality

The Virtues of Reality

youth culture has become less violent, less promiscuous and more responsible. American childhood is safer than ever before. Teenagersdrink and smoke less than previous generations. The millennial generation has fewer sexual partners than its parents, and the teen birthrate has traced a two-decade decline. Violent crime — a young person’s temptation — fell for 25 years before the recent post-Ferguson homicide spike. Young people are half as likely to have been in a fight than a generation ago. Teen suicides, binge drinking, hard drug use — all are down.

.. It is easy to see how online culture would make adolescent life less dangerous. Pornography to take the edge off teenage sexual appetite. Video games instead of fisticuffs or contact sports as an outlet for hormonal aggression.

.. younger men dropping out of the work force: Their leisure time is being filled to a large extent by gaming, and happiness studies suggest that they are pretty content with the trade-off.

.. But if anything, the virtual world looks more like an opiate for the masses. The poor spent more time online than the rich, and it’s the elite — the Silicon Valley elite, in some striking cases — that’s more likely to limit the uses of devices in their homes and schools, to draw distinctions between screen time and real time.

.. any effective resistance to virtual reality’s encroachments would need to be moral and religious, not just pragmatic and managerial.

Epidsode 207: “Confident Pluralism” with John Inazu

Skye: I’m no longer surprised by the number of Christians who take pride in being afraid.  (26 min)

The millennials have a distaste for the national power politics like the church took in the 1980s and 90s.

That activism was for the church rather than society/others.

When Christians have had power, they have used it for bad ends (30 min)

What do you do when you encounter hypersensitive people who are not confident, who want to be fully accepted/embraced? (47 min)