Demographics - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 3/9/23

I think it was just intuitive on his part because it didn't stay with him, you know, because his later in life choices, you know, didn't work out that well. But the Mustang is certainly an enormous, enormous success story. He saw that coming and they they literally could have sold millions of if they could have made him. But they couldn't make them fast enough, right, I mean, that was one of my first cars. I remember my dad got me that for school and I should have kept it.

You want to hear a break break your heart story, Yeah, I had. I lived in South Florida and we were at ground zero for Ian In fact, you know, we stayed and I had in my garage nineteen sixty five Mustang K Coop, which is like an extremely rare car with a Shelby motor in it, and I lost it in a flood. Yeah, heartbreak. I had a sixty seven. Well there you go, so we could talk cars all night. We don't want to do that. You had told us a story years ago about Harley Davidson missing the boat

with demographics. Tell us that story again. Well the actually, you know, we had American Honda as a client. An American Honda in nineteen eighty six all of a sudden stopped selling. You know, the Honda motorcycles. Kawasaki, Suzuki and Yamaha had exactly the same problem. It just stopped selling. I got a call from American Handa and that was our client, and they said, you know, did you run the ads? And I said, yes, I did. What's going on? And they said, was no traffic in the dealerships. But

this this strange, awful bike. Uh, according to this person I was talking to it Honda. They said that the Harley Davison was selling like crazy, and why what was the baby Boomer? The baby Boom were moved on. We were selling motorcycles. The Japanese motorcycles were being sold to men. Sixteen to twenty four period, and then Boomers moved on. But then in in the around the year two thousand,

you know, Harley's were selling and selling and selling. The dealerships had to you know, they built these monumental uh dealerships for you know, tens of millions of dollars, and then the baby boomers couldn't hold them up any longer at night. They were too heavy. Yeah, you know, the their signature models way of a thousand pounds, Yeah, exactly. So they tried putting three wheels, you know, putting an

extra wheel on them, but that didn't work. You know, I live in South Florida and we see that, we see this. You know, you can get a Harley for nothing done here. That is amazing. Yeah. Why do people miss the mark on demographics? You would think it's a science that people would jump on right away. You know, that's a good question, George, And I think it just simply has to do with the fact that most people

can't count. You know. One of the examples I use is in you have a group of five hundred people in a group of a thousand people and essentially all you know, the same type of people. Which group will eat the most food. And most people can't answer that, they really can't, and and most marketers don't understand that. But that is it's as simple as that. People ask me all the time, how did we beat the Russians

in hockey in nineteen eighty What was so special about that? Actually, well, because the that we're playing on the US Olympic team were born nineteen fifty seven, fifty eight, fifty nine, sixty sixty one, So we had the biggest talent pool that we've ever had, and that made all the difference. Talent pools and markets are determined by numbers, and numbers are demographics, period. Absolutely.

I've told a lot of art I've told a lot of our clients whenever they sponsor in our program that you just can't use depending on the market you're going after. But if you're going after older people as well, you better put in a toll free phone number in your advertisement because they're not very savvy just on the internet. Well, i'll tell you this too. The you know, I had a marketing business for twenty years in New England and we very often had to reach seniors and the best

way to reach seniors was with late night programming exactly. Yeah, your audience I guarantee you that your audience one is predominantly older because when you get to be our age, you can't sleep all that well. And so that's where it works. And they buys it off, say again, and they buy stuff. Oh are you kidding me? The baby boomers. Let me tell you about the baby boomers. Baby. You know, we started out with roughly eighty million of them, and I don't think we're too much shy of that now.

They're currently fifty nine to seventy eight years old. They have George, they have a hundred trillion dollars in assets, they have ten trillion dollars in the bank, twenty twillion dollars in the stock market, and seventy trillion dollars in real estate. So when you have mass money and motivation, you are a market. We're going to take calls next hour with can so make sure you're part of the program as we talk about changing demographics. Indeed, what about schools.

Can our school's going to be hit eventually if if we have a downturn in younger kids. Yeah, and they are being hit already, and you can see that, you know, get behind it. I don't care where you are. Get behind a school bus and and see how a few kids are on the school bus. Now, it's it's just as it's a factor, and it's fallen off precipitously. We need to you know, a healthy healthy years about four million a good healthy year, and we're not near that

now and that's why. But we have the potential to be near that if we could just get the millennials, the eighty eight million millennials who are nineteen to thirty eight years old to get married and have kids. But the millennials have literally taken adolescence from twenty years old to thirty years old, and many of them are still with their parents. What did COVID do to the birthrate? Did it slow it down or increase dramatically? Slowed down? Yeah?

It you know, it's slowed it's slowed down the birth rate. But it also um disproportionately killed older people, which I think it's and we could talk about that if you want, but that's I think that's why it was designed. And I think it was designed in China because there's there's single biggest issue right now is they're going to have four hundred million elderly people in about twenty thirty, twenty forty,

and they won't be able to feed them. They simply don't have enough workers, um to be able to feed them. What are they going to do? And just let them die? Which is what literally what's happening in Japan. Japan is the kids you know in Japan is going to disappear, just like did they do the same thing as China. Did they have some kind of law or anything. I think it was a different reason. Um, I know this is probably you know, this is this is a little

bit of a hairy subject. But uh, technology has replaced um a lot of normal uh man wife activity, um, you know, and computers don't have babies and then not yet at least, and they're not going to um. And Japan is far more technical, far more ahead of the United States and there ahead of the rest of the world technologically. And Japanese young men and women are not even dating anymore, not even dating. Wow, what the heck

is that? So they're all on their smartphones. No, I think they're on their computers getting whatever they would have normally gotten from But you can use your smartphone as a computer. Yeah, it could be. But it's a it's it's a changing world and it really is. And that's

and that's why we're forecasting the end of globalization. So what is your prediction for the United States over the next twenty years, We're gonna okay, all things being equal, George, if if Generation Why and again Generation Why is nineteen to thirty eight years old, so they're like the next

big generation that's coming along. Aids are. Yeah, they start having kids and living normal lives and start consuming at levels that we're expecting them to and making the kind of money necessary so they can buy housing, which is a big deal. You're going to see a lot of multi family housing as a result of the fact that housing is so expensive. Now, I think we're going to

be fine. And as we talked earlier, the block of Latinos that are in our country are going to come of age and we're going to have consumption in the United States that's going to sustain us for at least another twenty thirty years, no problem at all, and healthy, healthy consumption in all areas, in all areas. Yeah, I'm talking everything. I'm talking everything from food, clothing, housing, everything, automobiles. I've noticed one thing when I see videos of Ukraine

soldiers and Russian soldiers. They all seem older they are. If you looked at the a demographic chart of Russia, you would you would see that it's disproportionately older, and it's they have like ten million more women than they have men and they only have a population about one hundred and twenty million Russia. Now Ukraine has a population of about forty million, and Ukraine is very very heavy on women forty plus. And neither country has kids, so

neither country has a future. And I wish that Putin would have called me. I would have told him he's wasting his time going in and trying to annex the population in Ukraine because it's not worth annexing because there's they don't have any kids. It's not healthy. What would you do if you were in charge or had the ear of people who could make policy, what would you

be telling them right now? I would be telling them to provide employment and housing for the young people, because once they're young people have employment and housing, you need housing. They will have kids. If you want your country to last, you know, to be a country by the year twenty one hundred, you have to do that. In housing. What would your definition of housing be? Could it be an apartment as well? It could be any yeah, it could

be it. Could you know who? I just I just did a a presentation for manufactured housing, and most people think manufactured housing is like a trailer court, and it's so different. Now if you can buy you know, a young person could buy a home for one hundred thousand dollars and I'll just use that in numbering because and that that may be high for sum or low for some I don't know. But you can buy a house now,

a manufactured house that is beautiful. And once we have enough of those that young people can afford and move into, you're going to see more children. Did you ever hear of Levittown, New York? I have not. What is that? Okay? Well, Levittown was. I don't know how many houses they built, but it was. It was because nineteen forty seven and eighteen fifty one they built eighteen thousand homes. And it was a perfect time because we had ten million gis coming back from you know, World War Two, so we

had about eighteen thousand couples. And these eighteen thousand couples produced eighty thousand children and these were manufactured homes. I think you could buy them for ten grand and they came with a TV. They So we need housing. We are short housing, and my best estimate we're short about twenty five million houses or housing units. I remember my dad bought their second house in nineteen fifty eight in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, and he paid eighteen thousand dollars for it. Yeah. Yeah,

paid it off as fast as he could. Had had a mortgage, had a twenty year mortgage, but he paid it off way before that. Eighteen thousand dollars for a house. Well, how about ten thousand dollars for a house in Levittown? I oh my god. Yeah. So the housing housing, housing. We need to take our kids seriously, and we're blessed with young people here in the United States. We have a crop of kids that are nineteen to thirty eight years old. That's the largest generation in the history of

our nation. And we have to make sure they can form families, have kids, and live lives. So it's amazing statistics to be sure. If you were going into business right now, would you build retail or stay on the internet? Uh? You know that that's a good question because I get asked that, and brick and mortar, I think it's going to do fine because the that that's going to foreign families is all about experience, and I think you're going to see a resurgence in brick and mortar retail. The

online retail is not going anywhere. I mean, it's gonna be fine, and they're gonna you know that, they will do fine. But both categories, and again online is staying around twenty percent. So which which would you rather be, the eighty percent or the twenty percent. I would choose the eighty percent with brick and mortar as much as you can. That's true. Yeah, restaurants are having a heck of a time, maybe since COVID getting employees. What's happening there, well,

a couple of things. One, helicopter parents, helicopter baby boomer parents and their kids, and their kids are the millennials, the eighty eight million millennials. They're allowing them to live at home and they're not encouraging them to work. But it's getting to the point now where they're going to have to leave the house. They're gonna have to throw away all those trophies they didn't deserve. They're gonna have

to grow up and date and get married. In start life, we will have plenty of labor, and we also have lots and lots of immigrants that are filling those rules. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern, and go to Coast to Coast am dot com for more