5 Idea Friday: new media step change, student groans, ecomm, Palmetto State, and unemployed weirdness

5 Quick hitters on this and that for the first weekend of 2026

Jan 02, 2026

you are what you eat, media edition (or short form video to rule them all)
ecomm, underpenetrated (grocery is an advertising business)
student groans
Palmetto State is thriving
unemployment weirdness (this has never happened before)

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You are what you eat, media edition

Long ago, Random Walk noticed something about media consumption, which has since seeped into the mainstream: there is a massive generational step-change, well underway.

On the one hand, youngs and youngish consume massive amounts of shortform video (on TikTok and YouTube), while, on the other hand, Olds and Oldish do not.

And because all of the medium, substance and style of short-form video are dramatically different than the print-TV combo favored by generations prior, there would be some dramatic generational differences in worldview and behavior. When it comes to media, you are what you eat.

Anyways, without wading into the “social media dunnit (or not)” debate, I found these survey results from Dan Frommer very much on-point.

Consider, for a moment, the disparity in “content creating,” i.e. who does it, and who does not:

Gen-Z+Millenials are far more likely to report having published something—a video, a thread, an essay, or a podcast—than their elders.

In fact, the least likely thing for Young(ish) respondents to have done is appear on a podcast, but at 14%, that’s still higher than any “creator” category for the Old(ish). The Oldish top out at 13%, for having posted something to Twitter, etc.

The Young(ish) like to “share.”

Not only are the Young(ish) far more likely to share online, it’s quite literally where they feel most at-home and amongst friends:

50-60% of Youngish report feeling both “most like themselves” and “most connected to others” when online.

To repeat, “more like themselves” and “most connected” online, rather than offline. So, about those surveys of alone time . . . I told you “being alone” wasn’t really “alone.”

For Gen-Z and Millennials (or more than half of them, at least), online isn’t just a persona, it’s a “true self” where human(ish) connection is made, more so than in the meatspace. So says the survey, for what it’s worth.

I find it pretty striking, even if it’s really just a longer way of asking: “was social media already a thing when you started college?”

It’s fair to say that social media has changed the way Youngs interact with the world, particularly the super-Dunbar world (i.e. with people they do not “know”). Youngs put themselves on blast, for all the world (followers, and hoped-for followers) to see. And that’s not entirely surprising, because that’s the internet, as they’ve always known it, and everyone they know has been connected to the internet, for as long as they’ve known them.1

That the Young(ish) would be more likely to develop parasocial “relationships” (and/or other connections) with influencers and creators, only follows from there. Not knowing someone “personally,” just doesn’t matter, as much.

That the youngish would “learn” lots and lots of things, and even more spectacularly, buy lots and lots of things from influencers and creators, similarly follows from there.

And yes, the Youngish (primarily) have elevated short-form video into QVC on steroids:

~60% of TikTok Shop’s nearly $4B in sales are driven by video.

And because Random Walk is partial to pareto distributions, it’s unsurprising that just 1% of short-form video creators, drive a majority of those ~$2B+ sales.

Moses Sternstein

September 29, 2025

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Under-penetrated e-comm

Speaking of buying things online (long a favorite theme of Random Walk), just a little reminder that (a) it’s quite popular; and (b) ecommerce still has more room to run.

Indeed, the fastest growing segment of ecomm is also one of the least penetrated:

“Food and beverage” is still only 12% purchased online, but the category has an estimated four-year CAGR of ~12%.

Here’s a backwards way of looking at it:

Despite higher prices, grocery and restaurant (and general merch, which is Costco etc.) have consistently grown as online shopping categories.

The only category that has consistently outperformed those food and supply standouts is health and beauty.

That’s part of why Random Walk likes KR 0.00%↑ (and WMT 0.00%↑ to a lesser extent). It’s part of why others get excited about CART 0.00%↑ and DASH 0.00%↑.

Grocery has always been an advertising business. And now, it’s increasingly an online advertising business with a trove a first-party data, and extremely high margin digital advertising revenue (that’s growing considerably faster than the core grocery revenue, albeit off of much smaller bases).2

Student Groans

Speaking of the Young(ish), they have absolutely no interest in repaying their student loans.

Since the moratorium was lifted, the vast majority of student borrowers barely flinched:

A staggering 75% of student borrowers have made zero payments since the moratorium was lifted. Heck, even 56% of high income borrowers have continued to tell the taxpayer to “shove it.”

As I said, student borrowers have absolutely no interest in repaying their loans.

And it’s not that they can’t necessarily, or they’re otherwise less creditworthy. To the contrary:

Overdue student borrowers of all incomes are less likely to be overdue on other kinds of debt (than pre-Covid:

Student loan payments (again, for all incomes) are a smaller share of discretionary income (than pre-Covid):

So, student borrowers aren’t otherwise falling behind on debt, and their monthly payments are relatively less burdensome than before, but, for the most part, they steadfastly refuse nary a red cent.

Obviously, this is a moral hazard problem.

No one wants to repay their loans, knowing full-well there’s a good chance that those loans may be forgiven. Who wants to be the sucker that does that?

And because “affordability,” (i.e. pandering to the up-for-grabs GenZ electorate) is politics de jour, the likelihood of a credible “seriously guys, we mean it this time” signal from Uncle Sam is pretty slim.

Unemployed weirdness

Random Walk has lots of thoughts on the labor market, and has done a much better job than most of divining the skinny.

But, I still find this quite puzzling, under-appreciated, and under-explored:

Long-term unemployed continue to mount, now achieving the post-recessionary peaks of both Dotcom and second-wave S&L recessions.3

Rising long-term unemployment obviously isn’t great, but just eyeballing this chart, it’s also extremely unusual.

The count of LTUE never rises except in the aftermath of a recession. What always seems to happen is a steep rise in LTUE, followed by a serial decline, until . . . the next recession, at which point LTUE spikes again (followed by another serial decline, during the recovery).

But not this time. This time LTUE is rising without a recession. And it’s weird.

Yes, we’re in a “jobless recovery,” and yes, absorption is the relative problem, but nearly 2M people out-of-work for a half-year+?

When I get the time, I will dig into this more. My current hypothesis is laid-off white collar workers unwilling or unable to re-enter the market at a price point that the “higher for longer” corporate world will bare, but that’s just a guess.

The Palmetto Wonderland (reprise)

About 1.5 years ago, Random Walk stumbled upon the apparent under-the-radar wonder of the Palmetto State.

‘Oh Carolina, Jump n’ Prance,’ to quote the immortal Shaggy.

South Carolina has babies, jobs, and even a thriving metro. Myrtle Beach, especially, stands out for its bright present, and even brighter future.

Anyways, now Wells Fargo has noticed too, and they’ve got some fun charts to drive the point home.

Jobs? Yeah, South Carolina’s got jobs:

South Carolina’s 2.8% yoy employment growth is nearly off the chart.

And it’s not just the National Nursing Home, or tourism, no sir:

Prof. and business services, plus tech, are the two fastest growing categories of job-growth.

South Carolina not only has jobs, it’s got good growthy jobs!

The Palmetto State is a real place of business, not just a vacation and retirement place:

South Carolina’s metro population is actually growing, and growing much more quickly relative to the rest of the country.

Idk, cool stuff.

an anecdote from the world of cap-intro

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That’s not true for the Oldish, or someone like me, who straddles the Millennial/Gen-X world. Our first interactions with the internet were different. We were cautious about privacy. We used screennames. We worried about being tracked, and having our personal lives exposed. If we posted anything personal, it was gated and invite-only.

As a very early adopter of “The Facebook,” I abandoned ship once it opened up to the non-Ivy universe. It wasn’t an elitist thing, so much as the audience was too massive and unknown, and I wasn’t going to allow myself to be observed by whomever felt the urge to do so. When Google took its most ambitious stab at social media in the form of Google+, I diligently curated my “circles” to delineate the various tiers of friends and acquaintances.

The diving line between personal and public is pretty complex, and “Circles” was the killer feature that would make “sharing” possible again. Of course, Circles were completely unwieldy, Google+ was a spectacular failure, and that was basically the end of social media for me (until years later, when I started writing in public).

But, for the people who entered adulthood with Zuck’s Newsfeed fully-baked-in, i.e. 2006 or for anyone born ~1986 onwards, sharing for the public at-large was the default setting. Personal? Public? What’s the difference?

I guess it’s also why some people are excited about UBER 0.00%↑ (and maybe TOST 0.00%↑), which are looking downright cheap, given their growth:

On a growth-adjusted basis, Uber and Toast look pretty compelling.

To be fair, I haven’t looked at either very closely, and I used Gemini to make this chart, so I’m not even 100% sure the numbers are right, but it’s not what I was expecting.

And yes, this is count, not % of the workforce, so as the workforce gets larger (relative to decades prior), the peaks ought to be higher, but this is about trend, not peak.

The other thing that South Carolina apparently has is data centers: