The quote, uttered with contempt by the character Schmidt from the 2010s television series “New Girl,” lives on today as an internet meme. But its sentiment is age-old. Every generation looks over its shoulder to ask: Are the kids alright?

Fortune didn’t quite pose that question in 1994, a month before the U.S. hosted its very first FIFA World Cup. Instead, writer Shawn Tully asked one more suited to a magazine committed to internationalism and free enterprise: Are the kids—with “moxie, money, and astonishing similarities in taste”—the future of global business?

Tully, who Fortune is proud to still have on the masthead today as a senior editor-at-large and prolific writer, described a 200-million-strong cohort of teenagers whose tastes were converging even though they were scattered across the globe. 

What we today refer to as the Xennial microgeneration—on the cusp of Gen X and Millennial—were undoubtedly different than their predecessors, Tully wrote. They were more financially independent and fully “computer-literate”; they embraced multiculturalism, and were “deeply concerned with social issues.”

Yet they loved the same Levi’s, drank the same Coca-Cola, and rocked out to the same Red Hot Chili Peppers—whether they were in Los Angeles, São Paolo, or Seoul. That spelled a huge opportunity for big business that previously had to gear its products and ad pitches to geographic niches.

Tully contrasted the teenagers of the 1990s with another cusp cohort—what we now call Generation Jones, sitting at the nexus of Baby Boomers and Gen X. “Today it is difficult to sell the same products to 35-year-olds in different countries,” Tully wrote. “They prefer traditional food and fashion, from Schweinbraten in Germany to bicycle jerseys in France. In part, that’s because they never bonded with international brands as teenagers. But this generation is different. MTV and magazines, sports and music are building sturdier loyalties than in the past. MTV predicts that today’s teens will keep buying Levi’s and Apples as adults.”

The lucrative prospect of winning over teens as lifelong brand loyalists set off a fierce round of corporate competitions: Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi, of course; the denim disputes between Lee, Levi’s, and Guess; and the clash of the sporting labels Reebok and Nike, vying for teens’ attention as “superstar athletes exercise a shaman-like power over teen spending.”

Thirty years later, has much changed? Yes and no. The U.S. is hosting the World Cup again, it’s true, and today’s middle-aged adults—those damn Xennials—now fret about a new, AI-native generation. Social media influencers have replaced athletes in the driver’s seat of teen spending. But a radically different media landscape means the tastes of today’s teens are less monolithic than they once were. And a challenging economy means they’re not as financially independent.

Teenagers still drive the economy, and big business today would do well to heed Tully’s advice: “Kids everywhere express a hunger to rebel, to celebrate life, and to redeem a troubled world,” he wrote 30 years ago. “To comprehend, companies need a pitch-perfect understanding of this fickle, fascinating world of teenagers.” 

Good luck with that.