Are Millennials to Blame for Everything? An Investigation (But Yes)

Millennials! We already know they don’t know how to love and are awful at sewing and button repair. But the dark powers of the younger generation are just beginning to be fully understood. Turns out they’re also wreaking havoc on a host of other things across the globe, things like Thanksgiving, a once-popular but now barely observed holiday. Because of The Millennials, this sacred day of gratitude and fresh-scrubbed filial piety has been replaced with an orgy of shopping and furious, meaningless, nihilistic, non-procreative sex.

That’s the theory over at TIME, where the money team has realized that millennials are the reason everyone goes shopping on Thanksgiving now. To wit:

A broader look at millennial consumer behavior shows that a big reason this group is eager to jump on board with shopping on Thanksgiving is that young people like the idea of shopping pretty much every day. Other studies show that millennials are four times more likely to shop on Black Friday than their Baby Boomer parents, and that millennials have the highest percentage of any generation that will be shopping on Cyber Monday as well.

Add in that millennials are less likely to have families or own homes, and so therefore they’re less likely than older groups to host Thanksgiving or feel like the day must remain a sacred one devoted exclusively to family time. If anything, many members of Gen Y—who have always lived in a world with 24/7 access to shopping and deals, thanks to Amazon.com and e-retail—are probably more than ready to ditch their families for some portion of Thanksgiving when the day’s sales beckon. At some point, the small talk with Aunt Myrtle grows stale.

Or it could be that Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday sales are marketed more and more aggressively with every passing year, and everyone is taking the bait, with 45 percent of people in one survey saying they’d shop that day or night, compared with 38 percent the year before. The media push starts around October: we’ve already gotten dozens of “news tips” from various stores about their very exciting and newsworthy Black Friday ads. But it’s probably just millennials, who love shopping more than they love Aunt Myrtle, and would actually bulldoze right over Aunt Myrtle in their haste to reach a sale stack of iPads.

Other things millennials are to blame for, in brief:

– Coke and McDonalds on the verge of bankruptcy

– Sequels

– The chicken wing shortage

– Selfies, and thus, in turn, head lice

– The sluggish housing market (as well as over-occupied parental basements)

– Not having a job

– No more toys

– Iraq’s insurgency crisis

– The demise of organized religion

When you can no longer buy a house, find a single goddamn toy on the store shelves or worship your God, you know who to blame.