Here Are All The Things Millennials Are Killing, According To Olds

Sadly, the McDonald's McWrap was DOA. Millennials were spotted red-handed with the plastic murder weapon. According to Bloomberg, the types of millennials who are chowing down on McDonalds aren't really looking for low-calorie, quinoa-laden health food.

McDonalds phased out the McWrap line in the summer of 2016 after millennials just ignored it. 

According to The Wall Street Journal, younger folks are paying more money for premium pet food with high-end ingredients, and that's putting a dent in established pet food brands like Mars' Pedigree, Nestle's Purina, and Smucker's Gravy Train and Kibbles 'n Bits. Yearly spending on pet food increased by 36% from 2007 to 2017, Nielsen reports.

Business Insider characterizes this shift as an uptick in "human grade" snacks. And as millennials delay getting married and having children, they seem to be opting to become pet owners - and treating their dogs and cats "like... their firstborn children," according to Beverley Petrunich, the owner of a dog day-care center in Chicago.

At least one Facebook user has taken umbrage with this opinion. Duncan Johnson responded to Business Insider's article by rewriting its headline: "Younger people are treating their pets like living, breathing f*cking animals, and it's reportedly causing problems for some of the best-known pet food brands that have been selling garbage fillers that barely qualify as nutrition."

Separate from regular old "lunch" (which millennials are also slaying), the Manhattan power lunch evokes images of elite business leaders in well-tailored suits chowing down on steak and sipping on high-end booze as they make Wall Street history. Around lunchtime, famed Midtown establishments used to be the place for catching glimpses of celebrities, reporters, and generally high-profile individuals - but according to journalist and newspaper editor Steve Cuozzo, this is no longer the case.

The writer claimed younger executives are eating their lunches at work or no longer seeking the rich platters of their forebears. Cuozzo said plenty of famous and powerful faces still frequent Forlini's, Il Gattopardo, Porter House, and Balthazar, "[b]ut the schmoozing and table-hopping encounters by heavy-hitters who could move markets - the essence of old-school power-lunching at Michael’s or the extinct Four Seasons - is slowly but surely going the way of flip phones."

Cuozzo didn't make a particularly strong case for why millennials have diminished the power lunch mystique, since he noted this is also due to corporations moving their offices to other New York areas, and famous restaurateurs and chefs being pushed out by rising rents. But he claims it has something to do with the disappearance of smart-suited youths in favor of "influencers" who want to eat at communal tables of the "bare-bones, gluten- and meat-free Village Den on West 12th Street."

The writer did suggest the reduction in power lunching may be related to demographics, as its diners were "80 percent male and nearly 100 percent white." He also conceded that the scene "promoted heavy drinking, smoking, and lousy, overpriced food that privileged customers charged to their companies" - activities that may or may not fall within millennials' wheelhouse. 

Millennials may allegedly be killing relationships, but in the process, they're also killing divorce. A not-yet-peer-reviewed study from University of Maryland professor Philip Cohen found that from 2008 to 2016, divorces in the US dropped by a rate of 18 percent. Cohen posited that women are the primary catalysts in the downward trend, citing higher education, financial stability, and better healthcare for women overall, which decreases not only their likelihood to marry at a young age but also decreases risk of divorce. 

"One of the reasons for the decline is that the married population is getting older and more highly educated," Cohen said. "Marriage is more and more an achievement of status, rather than something that people do regardless of how they’re doing." Cohen predicted divorce rates would most likely continue decreasing as the younger generation of society swings toward equilibrium, but notes that non-millennial couples over age 45 continue to see an increase in divorce.