by Jane Porter | Mar 1, 2019 | Eat, March 2019
Millennials are blamed for killing modern industries by not spending or blowing their cash on frivolities. Could it be that they just like to buy differently?
When it comes to spending money, millennials are murderers, as the thinking goes. They’ve been blamed for “killing” industries from big beer to fast food, casual dining chains to department stores, starter homes to hotels, napkins to diamonds.
But the assumption that millennials are blowing all their cash on frivolities like iPhone apps and avocado toast simply isn’t true. Though they do value instant gratification, and are influenced by information they find online and via their social networks, they’re still picky. They can be counterintuitive in their consumption habits—they’ll shell out for a pair of Nikes or a Starbuck’s latte, but they also love to feel like they’re part of a bigger movement, or a community, and they savor experiences above all.
“Millennials value authenticity more than any other generation has,” says Heather Johnson Dretsch, a marketing professor in the Department of Business Management at NC State’s Poole College of Management who researches millennials’ spending habits and consumer behavior. “Baby boomers tended to trust brands more and go with the marketing message. Millennials want the brand to be real, from the inside out, from product quality to sourcing and ingredients.”
For millennials, education is key, in itself and to inform their spending. They’re optimistic and confident, and strive to be good people.
“They grew up inspired by their parents and grandparents, as well as the heroes they watched,” Dretsch says. “Millennials seek self-fulfillment and welcome motivation and support from friends and family, brands, influencers and social media. They believe that they can better themselves every day and through every consumption opportunity—products, services and experiences enable them to become better versions of themselves. They were taught that they could do anything, be anything, and thus, are always learning.”
Here’s a look at how millennials’ spending habits are changing a few key markets.
Food
They’re blamed for the deaths of Applebee’s and the McWrap, but millennials haven’t stopped eating out. In fact, they spend more money dining out, and less time cooking at home, than their elders. But they opt for healthy foods—read local, organic or sustainably sourced—from transparent manufacturers. When it comes to groceries, millennials want great shopping experiences, and love health-conscious, creative stores such as Whole Foods, Wegmans and Trader Joe’s, as well as no-frills, high quality options like Aldi and Lidl, and, of course, the local farmers market. Convenience is key; millennials buy healthy frozen meals or pre-made deli dishes, plus lots of snacks, instead of cooking from scratch. Services like Seamless and Uber Eats are increasingly popular. Meal kit services like Blue Apron and Hello Fresh are popular too, but they face a more uncertain future, partly because they’re pricier.
Source: The Robin Report
Booze
You probably won’t catch them drinking a Budweiser or a Coors Light, but you need look no further than Raleigh to see that millennials love a craft brew or two. “Millennials like to be part of a movement, and Trophy Brewing, for example, is creating a movement around craft beer and developing it as a part of who Raleigh is, which is why millennials gravitate to companies like that,” explains NC State’s Dretsch. Generally, though, millennials prefer wine, spirits and cocktails. They like old-school or travel-inspired cocktails and the Instagram-worthy theater of making them, as well as discovering new liquor brands to share with friends, especially vodkas and whiskies. Overall, millennials spend less than baby boomers on booze. But they definitely drink more rosé. Source: Business Insider
Travel
Experience-driven as they are, it follows that millennials also are adventure seeking. They use social media to plan their vacations, often spontaneously, and won’t think twice about taking an Uber or Lyft in an unfamiliar city, or staying in an Airbnb instead of a hotel. They want to experience places like the locals do, learn new things, meet new people, try new food. “They’re not skeptical in the same way baby boomers or golden oldies would be about renting someone else’s house, or getting into a stranger’s car,” says Dretsch. And they take every opportunity available to mix business with travel; it’s called “bleisure,” or business-leisure, and it helps them balance working with enjoying life. Source: Forbes
Furniture
While boomers wouldn’t dream of buying a sofa “site unseen,” millennials have fewer hangups about buying furniture online. Direct-to-consumer companies, including Article, Yardbird, Burrow and Revival offer designs with a clean-lined, contemporary aesthetic. These companies don’t overwhelm with too many options and they’re happy to mail wood and fabric samples in advance. They source responsibly and use recycled materials; many companies ship their (often modular) furniture to customers for free. Clients can send pieces back if they don’t like them for a refund or exchange, and, by cutting out the middleman, customers get higher quality products at reasonable prices relatively quickly. Win, win, win.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Apparel
For years, they fueled fast fashion chains like Forever 21, Charlotte Russe and Zara, at the expense of pricier, higher quality shopping mall standbys such as J. Crew. But, as they’re aging, millennials’ tastes are also evolving. They’re becoming more aware of the havoc fast fashion wreaks on the environment and, as online influencers gain more traction, millennials want to try their hands at cultivating their own unique personal styles. Now, they’re willing to spend more on fewer quality basics, and they’re increasingly spending time shopping for clothes online, at websites like ASOS, Fashion Nova and, of course, Amazon, rather than in brick-and-mortar shops. Swedish retail giant H&M recently announced it’s closing more than
100 stores after accumulating more than $4 billion in unsold inventory. We can likely expect more Marie Kondo-influenced magic in the years to come.
Source: Forbes
Housing
To see how millennials are changing the housing market, check out our real estate story here.
by Jane Porter | Mar 1, 2019 | Buzz, March 2019
Last summer, Katie Salisbury, 29, and her husband, Michael, 33, found their dream home in Raleigh. The new, 2,800-square-foot house on Blueberry Drive had big closets, beautiful light fixtures and glass knobs on the bathroom cabinet doors, which Katie loved, and a spacious, open kitchen and screened-in porch in the backyard that swayed Michael.
The trouble was, when they showed up with their realtor to see it, they learned that the home was already under contract.
“I still wanted to see the house, and Michael pouted, because he didn’t want to get his hopes up,” says Katie.
“It was frustrating,” Michael says, “because Katie had seen probably 40 homes up to this point, and there hadn’t been anything as nice as this one for the price, which was still over our budget.”
Fast forward two weeks, and the couple’s agent texted to let them know that the home’s seller was seeking out interested buyers again. Following their evening shifts—Michael works as an ER doctor at Wake Med hospital locations around Raleigh, and Katie is a nurse practitioner at Rex—they took another, early morning tour of the home. That afternoon, they submitted an offer to the seller, and it was accepted.
The Salisburys’ experience is what local realtors describe as fairly typical for first time homebuyers in Raleigh, a process that requires patience, compromises and a willingness to realign budget expectations with inventory that’s actually available inside city limits.
Generally, millennials are waiting longer to buy their first homes, renting long-term and, often, skipping out on
buying that starter home—one listed at around $350,000 and below—altogether. But, with more than 90 percent of home sales in the first quarter of last year going to buyers under the age of 44 nationally, there’s a good chance that, when a house is sold in any given market, it’s a pair of millennials doing the buying.
“Roughly 40 percent of first-time home buyers were willing to buy homes needing minor to medium renovations, or fixer-uppers,” says Andrew Ervin, a realtor at Raleigh’s DeRonja Real Estate. “The rest were buying more expensive homes. There are statistics showing that the age of the first-time home buyer has drifted from around 24 to 28, 29 years old. Instead of buying starter homes, they are purchasing homes at $400,000 and higher. In the Raleigh market, first-time buyers are waiting a little longer, but spending more money.”
When the Salisburys first relocated to Raleigh from Nashville, where they met on a blind date six years ago, they rented a house in North Hills for about $1,500 a month. Located on half an acre with a fenced-in yard, it was perfect for the couple and their beloved hunting dog, Allie Mae. After about a year of renting, the couple put in an offer on a home but withdrew it when the home inspection revealed issues with the foundation. It took another year for them to start house hunting seriously again.
“Our starting price range was $300-$400,000, but we didn’t understand the Raleigh market then,” Michael says. “After that first experience fell through, we were feeling a little gun shy.”
Katie worked with a broker, DeRonja Real Estate’s John Butler, who helped her get a feel for the market and taught her about the home buying process. Katie saw as many as 10 homes a day over the course of two months before they found the house on Blueberry Drive. The Salisburys had some firm requirements for their future home, but also found that they would need to compromise. While they were able to find a newly constructed home that required minimal upkeep, was close to both Rex hospital and the highway, that had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, they had to give up on their dream of having a big yard for Allie Mae to run around in.
“It has everything we wanted except for a big hunk of land,” Michael says. “It’s on less than half an acre, a quarter acre. But it’s close enough to Umstead Park and the greenways where we could compromise.”
At a price point of more than $550,000, they had to compromise on the budget, too. But as anyone familiar with Raleigh’s real estate market will tell you, there’s very little available within the city for less than $300,000, and housing stock isn’t keeping pace with the number of people who need housing and want to buy in the city.
“First-time buyers in Raleigh as a whole are not going for $350,000 and less,” says Ervin. “To find something in that range, $300 to $350 [thousand], you have to go outside of Raleigh, which people are doing, to Holly Springs, Clayton, Wendell. If you’re looking in the $250-$325,000 range, you’re in the same ball park as a very large chunk of people. When you start surpassing the half-million mark, you weed out some of those people a little, but there’s still a good amount of potential buyers. It’s very competitive.”
In buyers’ favor recently have been record low mortgage rates, so buyers haven’t felt as much pressure to put down 20 percent of the cost of the home to begin with. Less financing means homeowners can put money towards more house, or renovations. In general, 2018 was a hot year for national home sales, though the market slowed towards the end of the year and is expected to cool off through 2019.
In Raleigh, we can expect the market to remain hot for quite a while, however, with rising home prices and low rates of foreclosure. That’s great news for homeowners, like the Salisburys, who will be able to enjoy steadily rising home values.
“It’s perfect,” Katie says of her new house. “We worked really hard to get here and it’s really rewarding to have a beautiful home. It’s cool.”
“We’ll be staying here a long time,” Michael adds. “Not having a ton of land has been very easy to work around and the house is just beautiful.”
by Jane Porter | Mar 1, 2019 | Buzz, March 2019
Campbell Law School celebrates the 10th anniversary of its move to downtown Raleigh this month.
We take a look at the important work its faculty and students are doing in the community.
Pro Bono Services
Campbell Law students are encouraged to devote 50 hours over the course of their law school careers to doing pro bono work, and, through the school’s student-run Pro Bono Council, students can choose from 13 different projects to work on. From doing casework with the state’s Center for Actual Innocence, to training staff at local restaurants on the laws around service animals, to helping first responders write up wills, students assist local attorneys and organizations with important legal services without payment or class credit, in the spirit of helping others and the community at large. Last month, the council launched the Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, where law students assist immigration law attorneys with their work with local immigrant and refugee assistance organizations navigating complex immigration laws. “The legal profession is built around helping people,” says Evin L. Grant, a Campbell alum and the law school’s director of student life and pro bono services. “There are people in the community who don’t have access to the same resources but deserve the same level of care and work everyone else deserves. Pro bono services give people the opportunity to access those resources, to get justice when justice is due.”
Restorative Justice
Nearly two decades ago, Campbell Law Professor Jon Powell, a criminal defense attorney, was looking for a better way to deal with juvenile offenders that didn’t involve handing them over to the criminal justice system. He found that giving young offenders and their victims space to come together for an open dialogue—where their statements were kept confidential and inadmissible in court—was a better way to repair harm and correct wrongdoing. “My goal was to create a program where a kid would never have to touch the legal system,” says Powell of the method that is now the driving force behind Campbell’s Restorative Justice Clinic. Through the clinic, which Powell oversees, Campbell faculty and students go into Wake County schools and hold mediation sessions with students experiencing interpersonal conflicts who have been referred to them. Third-year law student Nichad Davis calls it the “circle process.” Davis has been working as a mediator, or “circle keeper,” with a group of Knightdale High School students who were identified as having gang affiliations when they were in middle school. “We facilitate dialogue around whatever issue is at hand,” Davis says. “I have the privilege of going into the circle with these young men, doing facilitated dialogue and unpacking different traumas they may have been through at home, addressing some of their behavior and thoughts, giving them a free space to be themselves and be free to communicate about the things they have been through.” Last year, the clinic took on 150 cases in Wake County schools, and has worked on 120 cases so far this year. “We find that most of us have similar kinds of challenges and we want to help them to create empathy and understanding with each other,” says Powell. “That really is the key to resolving conflict.”
Moving Forward
Whether it’s due to a bad credit history, homelessness or struggles with addiction, people often need support when they decide to take steps to get back on their feet and want to find work to support themselves and their families. At Campbell’s Blanchard Community Law Clinic, students provide legal services to low income people—referred from local nonprofits, such as the Raleigh Rescue Mission—who may need help repairing their credit, obtaining their driver’s license or having something expunged from their record. Recently, North Carolina changed its law to reduce the wait time for expunctions of misdemeanors from 15 to 10 years, and it did away with the limit on the number of dismissals that can be expunged from a person’s record. Last fall, Campbell’s clinic partnered with the Wake County Bar Association and Wake District Attorney and Clerk of Court for its annual Re-Entry and Expunction Resource Fair for people interested in having their criminal records expunged. Campbell students worked on 40 cases of people who were eligible for record expunction. “The desirable outcome is to remove in accordance with law some criminal charges, or dismiss charges, so they are more employable,” says Ashley H. Campbell, the clinic’s director. “Expanded expunction eligibility is a nonpartisan issue where there is consensus that we want people to be able to be employed, get back into the workforce and support their families. That is our goal, to help support individuals moving forward.”
Neota Logic Criminal Records Expunction App
Campbell offers a class on coding, and its professor, Campbell Law alum Tom Brooke and a creative group of students, developed an app that can screen people for criminal record expunction eligibility in North Carolina. If they’re eligible, the app can also refer users to a lawyer or otherwise help them begin the expunction filing process. Using the Neota Logic software, the app asks users questions to evaluate their eligibility for expunction under state laws. While it isn’t available to the public yet—attorneys are still evaluating whether the app complies with guidelines for practicing law under the North Carolina Bar—students did give it a test run at the Wake Re-Entry and Expunction Resource Fair in October.
by Jane Porter | Feb 4, 2019 | Buzz, February 2019
A block in a thriving urban neighborhood. A 1920s brick warehouse that once served as the Carolina Coach bus depot. A cultural shift in how we eat, drink and interact.
These are the elements that will converge when Transfer Company, downtown Raleigh’s long-anticipated food hall, retail center and events hub, holds its grand opening next month. More than five years in the making, developer Jason Queen and team financed renovations of the 43,000 square foot indoor space, known as Stone’s Warehouse, and 7,000 square feet in adjacent outdoor parcels, through a combination of state and federal tax credits and loan programs.
“It’s been cool to see the building come back to life,” Queen says. “Slowly, in the next couple of months, the public will see the renovation and the building like it used to be.”
The existing historic buildings at 500 East Davie Street will house 15 anchor tenants in the main food hall, including a mix of food and drink vendors, plus rotating retailers selling handmade goods and other products weekly. Production facilities for Videri Chocolate Factory and Burial Beer Co. are located off of the main food hall along East Street, and are set to be fully operational this summer. A commercial grocery store and four tenants will go into a new building behind the warehouse, slated to open in late 2020, and 15 townhomes lining the property’s eastern perimeter along Chavis Way will be finished and sold by the end of this year.
Queen says he had only one expectation of the tenants he recruited for Transfer Company: They be the area’s best of the best.
“Ultimately, we wanted the top three vendors within their own subcategory within the food industry,” he explains. “So, if we couldn’t get one of the top three bakers in the Triangle, then we don’t do a bakery at all. We got really lucky and we did attract the best in the Triangle in any single category that we went for.”
Inherent to the renovation process was a commitment that the final product be something that the surrounding community could collectively be proud to take ownership of, while integrating into the fabric of the neighborhood without replicating any of its existing assets.
This commitment informed decisions around everything from parking—at some 50 spaces, there’ll be less of it in order to avoid breaking up the block, and to encourage people to walk from their homes, apartments and nearby parking decks—to the curated tenant mix to providing space for families, neighborhood meetings and community gatherings, for instance, in the new plaza and mezzanine areas.
“My big goal with Transfer Company is that I want it to be a constant celebration of food, knowledge and community,” says Nick Neptune, the food hall’s general manager. “It’s one layer after another to wrap your mind around what it means to be a part of that.”
He’s right.
The food aspect is straightforward, but constantly celebrating community and knowledge took some thinking through. Transfer Company’s design capitalizes on a cultural shift in how we have come to socialize and interact with one another in a way that’s more open, communal and connection-driven.
“There’s an innovation component to what we’re doing,” Queen says. “Innovation occurs with the transfer of knowledge across industries to people. Our role in that is to develop a space that maximizes the opportunity for the transfer of knowledge by developing a space that maximizes chances for social interaction. You make longer tables, have people sit together and, all of a sudden, there’s an opportunity for knowledge transfer and the creation of innovative products.”
To illustrate his point, Queen has an example at the ready. There’s a beer that Transfer Company tenant Burial brewed, mashed with spelt from fellow tenant Boulted Bread. A chai imperial stout, it’s called “The Crown of Divination,” and has notes of nutmeg, cinnamon, black tea, ginger and cardamon. It’s “a righteous crusade,” Burial’s website states, “upon a pathway divined by the hand of the supernatural.”
And, at 10 percent ABV, it’s a knowledge transfer that goes straight to your head.
Could anything be more Raleigh?
Transfer Company Vendors
Sweet Peas Urban Gardens
Grows and sells more than 55 certified, naturally grown microgreens and vegetable shoots produced in Raleigh.
ARA
Chef Jae Lee creates Izakaya street-style food featuring a special combination of Asian flavors.
Dank Burrito
The third NC location for chef-inspired tacos, burritos and bowls. Using flavorful bases that vary from Asian pulled-pork to shaved ribeye, Dank Burrito creates unique combinations that make for stunning results, including house-made salsas and pico with toppings like ginger slaw, kimchi and dank yum yum sauce.
Captain Cookie & The Milkman
Just what the name says: freshly baked cookies, local milk and ice cream sandwiches. The owners are UNC graduates who have two brick-and-mortar locations in Washington, D.C. This will be their first in North Carolina.
Chhote’s
Authentic Indian street food from the owners of Cary’s Biryani Maxx, Chhote’s will make you think you traveled around the world to Mumbai.
Che Empanadas (open now)
Owner Anabel Rossbach is finally making her adored Argentinian pastries available to the masses. Fan favorites include Carne Dulce, the basil-filled Caprese and the traditional Jamon y Queso.
Benchwarmers Bagels
Wood-fired bagels and slammin’ coffee from the owners of Jubala Coffee and Boulted Bread. Need we say more?
Locals Oyster Bar (open now)
Another masterful collaboration between Person Street Bar and Locals Seafood. Order a drink and dine in on fresh fish and steamed shellfish, or buy a fresh catch in the seafood market to take home.
Videri Chocolate Factory
A longtime resident of the Warehouse District Videri is expanding and will offer chocolate inspired desserts and pastries.
Burial Beer Co. (open now)
Known for crafting a range of beers from Belgian-inspired ales to bold American styles in Asheville. This location will sell core beers but also offer special bottle and can releases, as well as a draft selection of experiential, small-batch beers.
by Jane Porter | Feb 4, 2019 | Eat, February 2019
It’s late afternoon on a weekday at Raleigh’s new, Japanese cuisine focused restaurant O-Ku Sushi, located on the first floor of the Dillon building in downtown’s Warehouse District.
Servers and sushi bar staff, clad in telltale black uniforms, busy themselves with side work and bar prep in the warm, wood-toned dining room, replete with tall windows and funky modern light fixtures. Back in the kitchen, chefs are gearing up for what promises to be another long dinner shift. In many restaurants, the front of the house is the front, the back of the house is the back, and nary the twain shall meet. But at O-Ku, every day, this division is decidedly, deliberately discouraged by a tradition that’s not just reserved for the restaurant’s customers— the simple act of breaking bread.
O-Ku executive chef Richard Fong is running vats of broth, plates of chicken and beef, deep bowls filled with soba noodles, fried dumplings, veggies and bean sprouts, plus spoons, chopsticks and dinnerware, out to a long dining room table that serves as a buffet for the roughly two dozen staffers who have come in to work. Soon, everyone’s lined up single-file, holding their bowls, chattering and bobbing along to Michael Jackson songs, excited, clearly, to enjoy another “family meal” with their coworkers.
“At a lot of restaurants, you’ll see the front of the house and the back of the house don’t really speak to each other like they do here,” Fong says. “This way, everybody gets to know each other, gets a little closer, just like at home, having dinner with your family.”
It can be hard thinking up new ideas of ways to feed everyone before diving into work, Fong acknowledges. With a budget of $50 per day, he’s responsible for meals five days a week, while servers and other staff pitch in and buy and prepare meals for the other two. They’ve had Asian food aplenty, but also Italian dishes, tacos, shawarma, chicken fingers and sandwiches. Everyone seems to agree, the extra effort is worth it for the sense of camaraderie it fosters.
“We all need each other to be successful, so this is one of the best ways to bridge that [front and back] divide,” says Robert Locke, O-Ku’s general manager. “It helps you realize, these are a bunch of people just like you, they do stuff outside of here, they have hobbies and passions and kids. It just helps you connect.”
The concept of eating a family meal before work isn’t unheard of in the restaurant industry.
Raleigh restaurateurs, including Scott Crawford and Ashley Christensen, do similar things with their staffs, and there are even cookbooks available that describe family meals at the nation’s well-known restaurants. But, certainly, few places are so ambitious as to make it a point for their workers to eat together every day of the week. At O-Ku, it’s a tradition that’s become important enough that when the restaurant made the move to start serving lunch in January, it decided to close its doors between 2 and
5 p.m. so that the family meal time could be preserved.
“It’s just baked into the cake of what we do,” Locke says. “It’s part of who we are.”
The Indigo Road Restaurant Group, O-Ku’s Charleston-based parent company, places a premium on taking care of its employees in both small and big ways, says founder and managing partner Steve Palmer. The group, which owns 20 different restaurants in six cities in the Southeast, brings a creative approach to making hospitality jobs attractive to its current and prospective employees.
Along with the family meals, Indigo Road restaurants, including The Oak Steakhouse, slated to open in Raleigh this year, offer their employees services such as free culinary school training, mental health counseling, and even an interest-free loan when they’re ready to make a down payment on a house.
“We believe that if we take care of our workers, they’ll take care of our customers,” Palmer says.
It’s been a winning strategy so far. In an industry where the numbers of service and hospitality workers in the national market have recently been declining due to factors such as long hours, high stress and low pay, Indigo Road has grown, and rapidly, since its inception in 2009.
Chefs, especially, are allowed a large amount of creative freedom in devising menus. Each of the five O-Ku locations—in Charleston, Atlanta, Charlotte, Washington, D.C. and Raleigh—are all designed differently, with different menus, features and specialities according to the chefs’ individual talents. It’s not hard to see, then, why getting a free meal each day before a shift is an attractive option to would-be workers, especially in a restaurant market like Raleigh’s, where the labor pool is limited and competition for talented, reliable workers is near constant.
“We all work in this industry, and believe breaking bread with people is important,” Locke says. “People can cook at home but they come out for an experience. It’s really important for us to do that with each, other too.”
