There is a famous scene in the movie The Graduate, where the protagonist is advised on the future: one word: plastics.

Nowadays everyone in business is predicting: boomers are aging, millenials don't want so much stuff.

But it appears there's a big problem with something related:

The Image of American Hyperbole

[....] Kmart adopted this slogan just last March, after several years of market share lost to Walmart, in order to attract a rising generation of millennial shoppers. The hope was to convince them (or, I guess, remind them) that consumption, retail-style, could, in the corporation’s words, be “fun,” even “awesome.” 2016 was the hundredth anniversary of Kmart’s incorporation; the hint of self-consciously campy nostalgia in its new “look and feel” seems connected to the steady decay of the shopping experience that once helped to define, and to bolster, a wide swath of working- and lower-middle-class life in America. In the years since 2004, when Kmart bought Sears, another venerable but declining department-store brand, for eleven billion dollars, retail jobs have continued to vanish, and department stores in particular are languishing, perhaps unto death. A Times editorial lamenting this development was accompanied by an illustration that serves as a kind of foil to Novak’s photo: a tattered shopping bag, emblazoned with a sad-looking Old Glory. Kmart’s retro rebrand, then, offered a kind of time travel: the race through the aisles, the register’s ring, the unfurling of a long, coupon-laden receipt—these were all happy distractions from economic insecurity and a polarized Presidential election that could be explained, in part, by the dynamics that had brought the chain, however smilingly, to its knees.

The irony in the photo—this over-the-top, somewhat desperate slogan, plastered, for all its bombast, on a wispy plastic bag—seems built in, first by Kmart itself, and again by Novak’s straightforwardly beautiful, self-consciously patriotic framing. The photograph is not an advertisement, Novak explained over e-mail; she’s just fascinated by the words people put on plastic bags. It’s not quite satire, though. It reflects perfectly the American predisposition toward hyperbole under duress. (Emerson, during the run-up to Civil War, might’ve written something commensurately hysterical.) It matches, too, the broader marketing trend—derived from an initially subversive, currently stale genre of Internet writing—of addressing younger consumers, and younger voters, with infantilizing language that verges, often, on contempt. The word “ridiculous” is the tell, and, in many more ways than one, the truth [....]