Malice against millennials misplaced
What are you less likely to find in a newly updated Marriot hotel room? A Bible, or a desk with drawers?
If, on account of waning religiosity in society, you guessed “Bible,” you’d be wrong. It’s the traditional desk you are unlikely to find in your new Marriot room, as the international hotel chain is in the process of renovating thousands of hotel rooms, replacing its clunky, old-fashioned desks with smaller, sleeker alternatives or in some cases, movable work stations akin to cocktail cruisers.
This change doesn’t sit well with some hotel guests — namely business people who complain the new work stations are insufficient. The Calgary Marriot Downtown Hotel has gone modern, to the extreme chagrin of one guest who recently told the CBC she thinks the change is “hideous.” And who, allegedly, is to blame for this supposed affront to traditional hotel living? Surprise, surprise, the scapegoat du jour — millennials.
When Dan Wetzel, a disgruntled sports columnist and guest at a Marriot in the United States asked why his room was equipped with only a small table, he was allegedly told that the rooms were updated to suit the tastes of the millennial generation, a demographic rumoured to live exclusively on smartphones and tablets — devices alien to the good old-fashioned writing desk.
Marriot explicitly denies that millennials were the catalyst for the hotel’s new look; the chain says the modern workspaces merely reflect changes in technology and the way people work.
But the theory — that those pesky 18- to 34-year-olds are behind the rapidly reducing desk space — has already injected itself into the news narrative and, of course, onto social media, where crankiness comes in all ages. Hell hath no fury, in other words, like a baby boomer scorned by a millennial. The issue has “spurred a whole lot of headlines,” says a Marriot public relations rep, Nina Herrera-Davila, even though the hotel has received very few complaints about the new rooms.
But what makes this already bizarre bout of desk-themed outrage more bizarre is that of the 20 or so millennials I phoned and consulted on social media this week, only one said she had never used the desk in her hotel room. Everyone else said they liked the big sturdy desks, which they used on business trips or, according to one friend, “to hold scented candles.”
This doesn’t mean that millennials are particularly prone to old-fashioned office furniture (20 people does not a substantial study make) but I do wonder if our elders sometimes overestimate the degree to which we are cutting edge — and unfairly implicate us in changes they may have ushered in themselves. After all, according to Herrera-Davila, the hotel chain conducted a focus group and discovered “the feedback on technology was crossgenerational.”
Every demographic — boomers and Gen Xers included — liked the idea of a modern work space. “I am not a millennial and I travel with two to three gadgets. Things have changed and evolved,” Herrera Davila says.
Well, not everything. Scapegoats are as old as the hills, and there is perhaps no scapegoat blamed more frequently and zealously for the disruption and confusion of modern life than the millennial. He is public enemy No. 1 not only in the erosion of desk space, but in loud movie theatres, the deterioration of formal language and grammar, and — who can forget — the decline of manners. Only the millennial walks down the street eyes glued to his phone, only the millennial interrupts concerts and theatre productions with his incessant, middling photography.
And yet, millennials are in many ways just as old fogeyish as their parents — in some ways, more so. The world is rife with data implicating us in annoying, anti-intellectual behaviour, but it is also rife with data that suggests the contrary: According to a survey from late last year, 18- to 34-year-olds are overwhelmingly annoyed by spelling and grammar errors on social media. In 2014, Pew Research determined that millennials are more likely to use the library than our elders. We are also apparently really into vinyl — which we pay for.
In short, we are more like you than you probably know. So if you need to blame somebody for the lack of desk space in your hotel room (or anything new and confusing in your life), don’t blame millennials. Instead, Herrera Davila says, “blame Steve Jobs.”