A few weekends ago, my family and I went to see The Founder.
The movie was a fascinating look at entrepreneur Ray Kroc and his machinations to wrest control of McDonald’s Corp. from its namesake founders, Dick and Mac, in the 1950s.
But there was something about the film that got me thinking about one of our latter-day investment mega trends: millennials.
Here’s why…
Putting the “Fast” in Fast Food
To me, the most interesting part of the movie was watching the brothers come up with the idea for their “Speedee Service System” in 1948.
Their innovation — parceling out the tasks of a skilled short-order cook into a factory-like assembly line of unskilled labor — is what put the “fast” in fast food.
A decade earlier, I doubt it would have been as successful. 1930s America was a different place.
People would have asked: “What’s the rush?”
But in the postwar years, America’s new suburbs were swelling with daily arrivals of young baby-boom families. As author David Halberstam noted in his book The Fifties, the McDonald brothers “understood that people were far more mobile and lived farther from work than ever before; more and more Americans seemed to be in a perpetual rush, and they wanted to eat quickly.”
That’s probably one of the first instances where the habits of young baby boomers (with some cajoling of their moms and dads from the backseat of the family station wagon) started to remake the American economy in their own image.
And you know what? It’s being remade again by today’s millennials — young Americans between the ages of 18 and 34.
The New Boom
In his latest monthly edition of Profits Unlimited, Paul just laid out a tremendous idea to his subscribers on yet another way to capitalize on the millennial trend.
This remaking of the economy is happening both slowly and rapidly, in ways both trivial and noteworthy — all at the same time.
- “CNBC for millennials”: Have you heard of Cheddar yet? You can stream their video feed from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for $7 a month.
- ESports vs. traditional sports: Team owners at the NBA and the NFL want to speed up the pace of their games. Otherwise, they lose millennials to fast-growing eSports, which Paul recently wrote about.
- Hello Sling TV and Netflix, goodbye cable: The number of pay-TV subscribers continues to fall. Why not pay just for the channels you actually watch?
- Moxy Hotels: Marriott is building its millennial-designed Moxy chain in hopes its legacy units don’t wind up like Howard Johnson’s in the decades to come.
- Bar soap extinction: Millennials much prefer the liquid version.
The fact is, the millennial investment ball game is just getting started, just like McDonald’s, Holiday Inn and hundreds of other baby boomer-related investments rode that mega trend in its earliest years. Profits Unlimited Editor Paul continues to identify the best ways to ride this investment theme.
Kind regards,
JL Yastine
Editorial Director
