Wow, I don’t spend nearly this amount on alcohol
Those are rookie numbers. Gotta push em up
Don’t worry, I’m bringing the average back up again.
It was never the avacodo toast preventing millenials from buying a house. It was the $34 Billion they each spent every year on booze.
If only they knew how to budget.
Considering half of Gen Z isn’t even legal drinking age yet, this isn’t too surprising.
Plus with declining birthrates in developed countries there are probably fewer overall Gen Z people than older cohorts. So even if they drank at the same rate you could still expect the absolute amount of alcohol consumption to be lower.
By that logic it should be around 10B by now
People in their 20s tend to buy well drinks and cheap beer unless they’re independently wealthy. Older people tend to have more expensive, or at least more specific, preferences.
Raw spending doesn’t mean much in isolation.
No because the half that currently can’t drink might drink twice as much
Also, THC drinks are all over the US now and very popular. Most of my (young millennial) friends there barely drink alcohol and have swapped them with gummies and seltzers.
“Fading”, more like jumped off a cliff.
There is no safe amount of alcohol to drink.
Everyone is broke.
They watched their parents make asses of themselves while drunk, and today everyone has a video camera in their hand.
I think this sums it up
Because they’re weak.
In all seriousness, income has stayed about the same in nominal terms, but the cost of living has gone way up even between millennials and gen z. So really income has gone down and booze is much more of a luxury.
There’s part of it but also anecdotally a lot of us are aware that alcohol in pretty much any quality has negative effects and therefore don’t drink at all. There’s a lot less pressure to drink than in expect there was for other generations, it’s pretty normal for me to meet other people who prefer not to drink.
alcohol in pretty much any quality has negative effects
The key is that this guidance came out somewhere between millennial and gen z coming of age.
When I was a child the TV news would run “health” stories about how moderate amounts of red wine are good for you. It turned out those studies were funded by the alcohol industry.
Man I went to a party last week, had one glass of red wine and no other alcohol, and woke up the next morning with a killer headache. I’m 42 and not much of a drinker but this kind of reaction made me think it was specifically the red wine. I ain’t doing that again for a long while, if ever.
Now this is a half remembered anecdote so… pinch of salt.
But I do remeber something about some people having negative reactions to the tannins in red wine. So it might not so much be the alcohol.
Low quality wine is much worse than its alcohol content.
Random personal anecdote: I can’t drink stout beers anymore. A single one gives me the worst hangovers. Same quantity of alcohol in other beverages doesn’t have nearly the same effects.
Drug use, and especially problematic drug use, has low price elasticity and the US is a relatively high-income country. The cost of living is almost certainly a negligible factor in the decline of alcohol consumption.
Although most of the gains have gone to top earners, US real median household income has trended slightly upwards over time and is not “way [down].”
Moreover, high-income European countries where even fewer people are budget-constrained when it comes to drug use have also seen dramatic declines in alcohol consumption.
Normalize it for age. How much did GenX spend at 22 vs GenZ? It could be similar, but it’s not clear. Of course old people have more disposable income once the mortgage is paid off and GenZ can’t get a mortage, just an expensive rental.
There’s a big drop off in drinking overall and it’s a good thing. Yet genZ is back on nicotine.
Wait until you see Gen Alpha’s spending on alcohol!
Yeah, I know some Gen Z college kids, and I will attest they definitely spend significant money on alcohol. And cigarettes.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the vice money is just split between alcohol, cigarettes, weed, vape carts, and adderall. So, just diluted.
Is illicit Adderall in the US “real”? Or are they usually pressed fakes?
I never understood why speed is/was so uncommon when I was in the US a long time ago. I was offered basically everything there, but never normal speed (without methamphetamine in it) like in Europe.
Idk. I think people get legitimate prescriptions and sell pills, mostly. If it’s not buying from someone you know who sourced them that way, idk how you’d verify it’s what they say it is.
It’s because they can barely pay rent.
My alcohol consumption has dropped directly because of this. I use to get a six pack and a bottle of wine and go out a few times a month and now I literally can’t afford any of it.
Yeah, poor people are notoriously sober
Nobody has healthcare, housing is unaffordable, we pay for everything with our tax dollars but all the profits go to corrupt pedofiles, Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison are turning the country into a mass surveillance prison for us to live in, there’s no laws for the rich, the earth is dying because the pedofile class doesn’t give a fuck about anything except doing as much evil as possible, there’s a genocide going on and 95% of American politicians are giving away unlimited amounts of our tax dollars to fund it and for the genocidal country to have universal healthcare and free college and a $400 monthly payment per child, the same politicians want to make it illegal to talk about or boycott Israel for their crimes, Trump has the nuclear codes, a secret police force is disappearing people and shooting people who are exercising their first amendment rights women’s rights are being stripped away and a lot of the boys and men are cheering……I could go on and on but the reason is there’s nothing to celebrate
In Germany, we have the word “schönsaufen”, which means something along the line of “drinking until something or someone ugly looks pretty” and I think that’s beautiful.
Elder millennial here.
…that just about sums it up. Well done.
what about chocolate, and smiling more. Have you tried those?
smh
That would be a reason for more alcohol
lol this thread not realizing it’s a shitpost, half of gen z have not make it to drinking age and this data could be years old
Other drugs are cheaper, and readily available.
https://northjerseyrecovery.com/why-gen-z-is-drinking-less-but-using-more-drugs/
Stimulants like Adderall and Xanax are often misused to cope with academic and social pressures.
I never knew benzodiazepines were stimulants.
They’re not? But they do help with the anxiety of academic and social pressures
It should say “Stimulants like adderal and depressents like Xanax are used to cope wiyh academic and social pressures”
Ah yes! The prostitutes, JFK and Stalin
Reminds me of the time I helped my uncle jack off a horse.
And often less harmfull than alcohol
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Half of gen Z can’t legally drink and 75% of them are broke?
They wouldn’t be broke if they weren’t such lazy moochers and worked real jobs!
/s just in case
On July 1, 2024, the census estimates of the number of each generation of drinking age, if I’m reading this Excel spreadsheet correctly:
Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012, but as of 2024 the only legal drinking age was those born between 1997 and 2003): 31.3 million
Millennial (born between 1981 and 1996): 74.1 million
Gen X (born between 1965 and 1980): 65.6 million
Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964): 66.9 million
So assuming that 20-somethings have less money to spend on expensive alcohol, and recognizing that Gen Z has less than half the drinking age population as the other generations, it’s not surprising for that generation to spend less on alcohol, even if their habits weren’t different than the older generations.
Now, their habits actually are different, so that might stretch things further. But a better way to present the data would be adjusted per capita. And maybe looking at historical data about when prior generations were the same age.
the theory that distinct generational behaviors can be bounded in ~15 year increments (which you display nicely above) has always seemed a bit off to me.
Excellent, I was thinking the same thing. If a graph shows that big a difference, it usually means that it is exploiting some not displayed variable to get the difference. Kids these days need to learn to spot such things.
Marijuana legalization has to be a big part of it
The mileage you can get out of $20 of weed is substantially more than $20 of wine, even with taxes and price inflation
You can get 2 bottles each of which can be about 4 servings over 3 days per bottle.
Because we’re broke
Gen Z here. Tastes like shit
Drinking is so ingrained in human culture that people often get into it because of social pressure.
That’s why it’s given special treatment in comparison with drugs like weed, even though it’s more dangerous.I actually rather like the taste. Although it’s certainly an acquired taste. Like salminak
Likely you haven’t had anything that doesn’t taste like shit.
I had, until I tasted alcohol. You’d think something that ruins lives would at last had a taste that justified it.
There’s this neat life hack where you drink enough and forget all about the taste - and most of the previous night, to boot!
I don’t actually drink though, tastes like shit.
tastes more like hand sanitizer, but I like the taste of hand sanitizer so I’ll drink it, but it’s also too expensive
We’re less social, drinks in public spaces have gotten too expensive, weed
