Gen Y Will Not Pay These 10 Things
Gen Y Won’t Pay for checking, long distance, mail, music, wireless, travel agents, books, news, or directory assistance. But, why?
Checking
Since the beginning of time, we’ve gotten free checking as students: Chase, Bank of America, Wachovia, Capital One all offer it to us. If we are no longer eligible as a full time student we have two options: A. Lie and tell them we are or B. Get direct deposit. Most banks will extend free checking for as long as we do this. Gen Y hates fees and we are smart enough to comparison shop. If someone is going to rip us off, it’s easy to hop online and find out who does it for free. It’s not the Mom and Pop economy anymore–we know there are plenty of banks out there who will cater to our needs.
Long Distance
Long distance was something our grandparents worried about. It doesn’t matter how far away from the person you are when you call them–it’s all has to go through outerspace anyway. The expression “it’s my nickel” sounds prehistoric. In actuality as long as we don’t go over our bazillion minutes on our cell phone we aren’t concerned. We most likely have free calls to all our friends and family on the same cell phone network. Plus, if our parents can text message, we are much more likely to drop them a note once in a while.
Quick–how much does a stamp cost? 32, 42, whatever, it changes more often than we ever need to mail something. Now, we don’t even know how much stamps are because of the Forever Stamp. BTW, we hate email too. It’s much too professional and the only things in our inbox are obligations. We know very few of our friends email addresses because they change too often anyway. We’ll just look you up on Facebook.
Music
First of all, we haven’t bought a CD since Jock Jams. Secondly, even if we don’t feel like beating the system with Bit-Torrents or whatever the newest Napster-like-service is, we’ll get it off YouTube. Forget radio, when we have Pandora Radio–it plays what we like and there are no interruptions. FYI–Pandora installed a usage limit this week, so check out Slacker Radio.
Wireless
While wireless internet is a necessity, it doesn’t mean we have to pay for it. First thing we do when we move into a new apartment is look to see which of your neighbors wireless we can pick up. Stealing? We don’t consider it stealing from the library or Panera bread. Oh yeah, Dear Starbucks and Barnes and Noble, you really piss us off trying to make us pay $3.95, but what’s worse is the hassle of registering and entering our credit card number.
Travel Agents
Let’s be serious–we don’t need any help with travel advice or finding the best price. We ask our friends where to go and do a little online research. Kayak, Cheap Tickets, Expedia and Orbitz is all we need.
Books
Cookbooks, phonebooks, appointment books–why buy a book when you bought a computer? As far as real books go, reading has been forced down our throats since age 5 and it just doesn’t quite stimulate the mind like HDTV, Xbox and YouTube.
Porn
If you pay for porn you either A. Have a problem or B. Have a problem. We all knew that kid who sold porn in middle school, but he’s out of business now thanks to high speed internet. The real issue with ordering a pay-per-view skin flick is you can’t clear your history on your cable bill.
News
Watching or reading the news used to be a form of entertainment. Luckily, we have better options than that for fun. If we really want to know something, we’ll bypass the newspaper that just reprints what happened and go directly to MLB.com to find out who won the game. No middleman needed. Gen Y gets our news through our friends–if it was important enough, we’ll hear about it. Most of us got 3 or 4 text messages when Michael Jackson died.
Directory Assistance
There might be Gen Yers who don’t know this term. Calling 411 or information for 75 cents is ridiculous. Yes, there is 1800-Goog-411 or 1800-FREE411 but we have Google, BlackBerrys, and the Yellowpages iPhone app. The best use we’ve ever gotten out of a phonebook was to see which of our friends thought they were superhuman enough to rip it in half.
