What if instead of modern brands, which is bad, we have slightly older brands (same owners though). Isn't it the best when the brands have different names?

Dude we got dropped off at the mall to hang out with our friends. The place where 100 different stores were all owned by 7 different companies. The fucking mall.

When did we outsource our shared culture to corporate identities as shorthand for those shared experiences

Some time during the 80s. I think it was one of Reagan's first bills

I think we've done that since essentially forever. Many businesses are for gathering or socializing. If this were the Middle Ages, we'd hang out at the inn after the work day was done, or maybe talk and drink down by the town well. Its just that in the modern day, businesses are stand-ins for "3rd spaces", because we've societally forgotten that we need those and should take care of that.

Yeah like idgaf about blockbuster, but i do miss family run local video stores and small chains. I mostly miss landlines tbh

On one hand, my town didn’t have a Blockbuster, but an independent video rental store. I still call it Blockbuster when i talk about it because it being the point across. So sometimes it’s just a short hand.

On the other, you really have a point. Personally, I am trying to be more mindful of decoupling “good times” from consumerism. The last two dates I had with my partner were mostly walking around chatting. I like having people over for board games, or going to the park. All zero or low cost activities that have been collectively pushed put of the “cool zone” by, I would guess, consumerism.

Christmas, Halloween and Valentine's Day are all entirely commodified, to the point where pretty much everything you think of as being part of Christmas is actually a hundred-year-old corporate psy-op to get you to buy coke and go to Macy's

It started convincingly in the 60s (tracking on Bowling Alone, a book written in 1999 about the decline of the American community), but isn't clear-cut on likely reasoning at the about halfway point I'm at, other than older more socially-involved generations dying out.

My take expanding what I've learned so far is that appears to be a combination of:

• there are things that are 'entertaining enough' at home to discourage former events like going over a friend's or coworker's, so general schmoozing is relegated at best to video games online with rare exceptions. The 60s is when television really "took over" the family room, but there was radio and books before it.
• the generation that grouped together to fight the oil barons died out, and did not transmit their union dinners and other community behaviors to their children.
• churches saw significant decline during the social movements of the 60s that has continued since.

So we may be too comfortable at home with new technology to go out, even if we're not fulfilling all of our social needs (that is, the "epidemic of loneliness" so often brought up). And when nearly all the interactions you have left is "vote with your dollars," whom you choose to pay becomes the political and social choice that defines who you are.*

* though the fact that a few people own most of the dollars means your vote basically means squat anyway, but that's getting on to class war, for which social isolation is a fantastic benefit for the ownership class against labor negotiation