100-year-old hot dog shop in Ohio won't reopen, millennials apparently to blame

But is it GenZee or GenZed?

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I thought that they were like 1000-year eggs. Not really that old, but treated with a chemical process to make them taste that way.

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I’m a late bloomer baby boomer

My obligatory axe to grind:

Generations are not real. People are born continuously. Age cohorts are a useful statistical tool, but individual people are a river flowing in and out of them. The social construct of “generation” is meaningless.

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I agree, except for the meaning we (as a society/culture) give it and we’ve given it some degree of meaning as a tool for understanding the past century or so, for good or ill. Hence, even if we plan to dismantle or reject it as a means of analyzing history, we still have to come to terms with it.

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Frankly that says a lot more about the generation that educated the Millennials than it does about Millennials themselves.

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Don’t blame Gen X; Boomers are the ones who reinforced and entrenched the all failing systems.

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I’m not inclined to point at any one generation and say “those guys are the problem.”

It’s not about when a person was born, it’s about what values they promote.

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I guess I should specify that small percentage of the rich powerful and White boomers is mainly whom I’m referring to, along with a few lingering Greatest Gens.

Most of the resulting damage we’re seeing now was going on long before 1970; it’s just that now the facade is crumbling faster than ever and TPTB no longer care about maintaining it.

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Yah, for sure. It’s just my peeve so I have to comment on it every time. We all have our stupid hills that we choose to die on, and this is one of mine. :grin:

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Roger that! :grin:

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Here’s the thing, the love of hot dogs in that area hasn’t really fallen off. Steve’s (old school cheap hot dogs) was beloved until they burnt down and Happy Dog (more hipster dog) was still thriving pre-covid (still there, but struggling). Old Fashioned Hot Dogs was just terrible, and not in the classic greasy spoon diner way, just bad. Once the rent started to rise they weren’t able to hold on because they almost seemed to work to alienate customers.

Not at all, one of the hotter restaurants in the neighborhood is still a hot dog joint. It is just hard to pay rent in a gentrifying neighborhood on $2 dogs, particularly when the bus lines that used to feed foot traffic have become less frequent.

I don’t think the Millenial blame is on that front. The neighborhood in question is in the midst of some sharp gentrification issues. The median income in the surrounding area was running around 20,000 a year and this was a restaurant that catered to that end of the income spectrum. A lot of the visible new, substantially higher income residents are in that age range. On top of the usual vitriol around gentrification there is an added wrinkle that most new development in the area is tax abated, so the poorer long term residents are often paying more property taxes (into the general fund) than the new residents. A lot of what is presented as an age divide in that fight is actually a race and class divide.

No, they were cheap and a lot of the other 24 hour food choices were gone. Steve’s had the good hot dogs, you just kind of ended up at Old Fashioned Hot Dogs. If they were ever good it was before I started going in the early 90s.

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{double-plus-upclick-heart-icon}

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(The same idea updated as postpunk disco)

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You know except for being as hard as a rock I bet a 100-year-old hot dog still has the same nutritional value as when it was made.

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Dear Millennials,

I still haven’t grasped that Millennials are now going on 40 years old. That is because I am old and still use the word “millennials” to refer to people in their early 20s.

Signed,
A Boomer

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I didn’t think millennials existed until about 20 years ago. Well, people existed, but no name for them.

I have a vaguer memory that the term meant a smaller spread closer to the year 2000, and then it was widened. Wait, maybe it’s that 20 years ago someone born in 1984 was only 16 years old, and that fit the term, but now it’s 20 years later, so the spread is wider. Are they still millennials 20 years after 2000, or is it that a new name hasn’t yet been coined for more recent births?

All I know is that when “2001” came out, I did the math and realized I’d be old in 2001, all of 41. And somewhere little Mira born in 1984 became middle age