Digital CPG Blog

A young woman walks through the drive-through. Photo Credit: joelogon.

As someone who lives in a small downtown condo, walks everywhere, and has never owned a car before my current position and 20 minute commute, a culture much less dependent on cars make total sense to me. Jack Neff of AdAge reports on this growing trend and how it affects e-commerce for CPG manufacturers:

William Draves,  president of Lern, a consulting firm which focuses mainly on higher education, and co-author of “Nine Shift,” has a theory that almost everything about digital media and technology makes cars less desirable or useful and public transportation a lot more relevant.

Gen Y will be working on “intangibles” in professional jobs, not on tangible things that require physical presence, Mr. Draves said. “Time becomes really valuable to them,” he said. “You can work on a train. You can’t work in a car. And the difference is two to three hours a day, or about 25% of one’s productive time.”

Mr. Draves predicts a resurgence of urban living in denser housing surrounding train stations. As a result, suburban shopping malls and big-box stores such as Walmart, Target and club stores that rely on people hauling big purchases away in cars stand to suffer.

Gen Y’s driving-behavior shift, however, won’t just be about helping main streets return as big-box retailers fade, Mr. Draves said. E-commerce is likely to benefit, too, as categories at first resistant to e-commerce take another serious crack at it. Alice.com, which is providing the platform and fulfillment now for more than 60 mainly package-goods e-stores, is seeing a growing share of its business, which drew close to 700,000 visitors in April from Gen Y shoppers, according to Compete.com, said CEO Brian Wiegand.

“This new generation, their first thought is not ‘let’s drive to the store to get these things,’” he said, “but ‘let’s get them the easiest, fastest, cheapest way.’ We call them internet-first people. We think that’s an important segment for us, and it’s also the biggest segment for our iPhone app, which is almost all Gen Y.”

Read the full, fascinating article >