The Dollar Cost of Declaring Things Dead Too Soon

I recently read an article that argued we have misunderstood Gen Z. The author suggested that Gen Z isn’t drinking less. They’re redefining their relationship with alcohol. Then follow up headlines proclaimed that Gen Z is having less sex. The argument is that they are being more intentional about the sex they have.

I’m not sure how anyone measures intentional sex, but okay. Whether you agree with those conclusions or not, they led me to a broader thought. I think we have a habit of confusing the thing with the way people consume the thing. Then we announce that the thing is dead, hold a funeral, and start writing business plans based on its demise.

We’ve been making this mistake for decades.

We said bookstores were dying. They weren’t. The giant chains that tried to be everything to everyone were in trouble. Independent bookstores found a new purpose. They became community centers, gathering places, and destinations. They figured out that people didn’t just want to buy a book. They wanted someone who had read the book to tell them why they should read it. Preferably while holding a cup of coffee.

People still love books. We just don’t necessarily want to wander through three floors of fluorescent lighting to find one.

We said television was dying. It wasn’t. Cable bundles were. People are consuming more stories than ever. They just aren’t waiting until Thursday at eight o’clock to watch them, and they are no longer willing to sit through seventeen commercials for prescription drugs with side effects that appear considerably worse than the illness.

We said newspapers were dying. News didn’t die. The business model did. In fact, our appetite for news became so relentless that many of us now know what happened in Washington twelve seconds ago and are angry about it before breakfast.

We said the office was dying. It wasn’t. The assumption that productive work could only happen in one place, during one set of hours, while wearing actual shoes, was.

Again and again, we mistake a change in behavior for the death of the thing itself. That isn’t just lazy thinking. It can be an expensive mistake. When businesses decide that people no longer want something, rather than asking how they want it now, they stop investing in the very thing that might have carried them forward.

The thing often survives. It simply finds a different path to us.

I’ve been thinking about this every time someone tells me movie theaters are dead. I don’t believe audiences have rejected movie theaters. I think they’ve rejected leaving home, finding parking, buying a ticket, and paying a small ransom for popcorn to see something that will be available on their television three weeks later.

Streaming didn’t kill the theater any more than Amazon killed books or Zoom killed work. Those technologies forced each industry to answer a harder question. Why should someone leave the comfort of home?

That’s why Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey matters. Whether the film ultimately succeeds or fails artistically almost isn’t the point. It is being built as an event. It gives people a reason to buy a ticket, get in the car, sit in a dark room with strangers, and experience something together that simply isn’t the same on a couch, particularly when the couch also includes a phone, a dog, and the ability to pause Odysseus while you go looking for something sweet.

That’s a very different proposition from simply releasing another movie.

We spend an awful lot of time announcing the death of things. More often than not, we’re just witnessing their evolution. The thing isn’t dying. The way we choose to consume it is.

The dollar cost comes when a business walks away from customers who never walked away from the product. It comes when money is poured into replacing something that only needed to be reimagined. It comes when an industry spends years defending the old way of doing something while someone else figures out the new way and takes the audience with them.

Independent bookstores understood that people still wanted books. Streaming companies understood that people still wanted television. Christopher Nolan understands that people will still go to the movies if the movie feels worthy of going to.

Every time a business mistakes changing behavior for disappearing demand, someone else gets paid. The customer hasn’t gone anywhere. And neither has the money. It has simply found a different path to someone who was paying attention.