In the spring of 1984, I was crushed not to make my Little League All-Star team. I will not go into too much detail, but imagine all your best friends were invited to a one-month party, and you weren't. You could watch it from afar but never get past the fence line. It was an early and abrupt welcome to adolescent loneliness.

I treaded water academically and spent much of my summertime as a camp counselor. It seemed a fun thing to do for a person in no way prepared to commit to a career path.

At most schools, if you switch majors, you basically start over. That means more semesters... and more money. The former might be appealing, but the latter is a major problem for a demographic already saddled with student debt.

In the mid-1980s, there was a grassroots desire for American culture. Maybe it was not a definite harbinger to what was to come in terms of the fall of the Soviet Union, but it certainly gave a heads up to the global merging of the retail culture.