Paula and I just released our latest Merchandising Report. Have you read it yet? If not, you should, there’s some really interesting stuff in there.

I’ve been thinking about one of the major takeaways quite a bit since the report published. We had asked retailers who they thought their core customer is. By and large, the answer was Generation X. Needless to say, with talk of the ascendency of Millennials everywhere these days, we were surprised to hear that it’s not their discretionary dollars retailers are openly targeting most.

However, when we asked these same retailers who is making their merchandising decisions, the answer makes a great deal of sense: Generation X.

I’ll resist political references here, but one thing many of us have learned in the past few months is that the hyper-connected world has not necessarily made us all that connected. Consider this: 20 years ago, if I asked you what you watched on TV last night, there’s a strong chance we were both watching the same person being interviewed on the Tonight Show. We could talk about it. And if we were driving to work at the same time this morning, about a 1 in 5 chance we were listening to the same radio program. We could talk about that, too. Personalized on-demand entertainment has all but ruled those possibilities out.

And the networking technologies that are supposed to expose us to various points of view have been around long enough for most of us to filter out the people we don’t agree with. I’ll openly admit: when the girl that grew up two houses away from me started posting a raging political agenda several years ago, I unfollowed her like she and I had nothing in common. Despite the fact that we come from the same place and have always had mutual respect for one another. Like it or not – we’re all in echo chambers now, and it took this election to wake many of us up to that fact.

And so it seems retailers are no exception. They’ve spent all kinds of money on all kinds of predictive analytics, replenishment, and allocation technologies. They’ve got a lot more money put aside to buy more of them in the next 12-18 months. And they continue to spend valuable resources training their hard-won professionals on how to make the very most of said tools.

But if all we’re doing is hiring Generation X merchants, doesn’t their inherent bias to buy for someone just like them render it all a little less effective?

Read the report and let us know what you think.