I notice that today’s young
people don’t seem to keep as much stuff as my generation has kept, and
certainly not as much as their grandparents kept. I think there are several
reasons for this.
I was
born at the end of the baby boom, so I had parents who were born during the
Great Depression. They were raised with relatively little in terms of material
goods, and by parents who were poor. My maternal grandfather lost everything in
the stock market crash of 1929, while my paternal grandmother raised a large
family as a teenage mom whose husband left soon after their youngest child was
born. As a result, these people valued…no, treasured…every item they owned, and
particularly anything that could possibly be useful, right down to pieces of
string.
Since
they lived with very little income, they learned to stretch everything as far
as possible, and to keep anything on which they had spent their hard-earned
income. Even if they no longer needed something, they kept it because “Someone
else might need it someday. What if we have another depression?” That’s what my
parents grew up hearing and seeing. As a result, I was raised to waste nothing
and keep everything.
But
that’s not all. Looking back, I realize that I grew up during the golden age of
merchandising. The quality of the clothes, housewares, and other products we
bought during the 1960s to 1980s was extremely high and also very appealing. I
grew up in the Chicago
area, so I cut my shopping teeth on Marshall Field’s flagship store downtown,
where there were 13 floors of incredible goods, all waiting to be wrapped in
tissue by the friendly Field’s employees and placed neatly in forest green
Field’s bags or boxes.
My
love of fabric began when my grandmother took me shopping at Field’s fabric
department, where she bought me my first pattern (clothes for my Barbie doll)
and led me up and down rows of gorgeous fabric. Gram could not leave Field’s
without a large stack of green boxes. When she wasn’t up for a trip downtown,
she would call Field’s on the phone and request something she saw in one of
their ads in her morning Chicago Tribune.
The next day, the big green truck pulled up and delivered Gram’s new dress, or
bedspread, or throw pillows. They were always sturdy and beautiful, qualities
which she had come to expect from Marshall Field’s goods.
By
the time I became a teenager, we had a new shopping option in our area:
Woodfield Mall. Billed back then as the world’s largest indoor shopping mall,
it boasted all of the major anchors of the 1970s (J.C. Penney, Sears, and of
course, Marshall Field’s). You could spend the entire day there and find an amazing
variety of fashionable and well-made clothes, shoes and home goods (mostly made
in the U.S.),
and also visit many specialty shops that made your shopping experience a lot of
fun. All of the stores were full of tempting buys.
Then
I got married and we bought a house. It wasn’t hard to fill a big, empty house
with furniture, window treatments, and carpeting, not to mention sheets and
towels. By now we had Marshall’s
and T.J. Maxx, where I could find the same high-quality items sold at the mall,
but at discounted prices. Back then, sheets and towels were designed for eye
appeal, and before long, our linen closet was overflowing. (My family used many
of those items for twenty years; that’s how well-made they were.)
For
my generation, shopping was a pleasant experience that eventually became a
pastime. No wonder we have so much stuff! Faced with the poor quality of many
goods since most of our manufacturing went to the Far East,
and companies became focused on how much profit they could make with lower-quality
goods, many of us have kept our high-quality goods. It’s hard to let go of
something when you know it will be impossible to replace it in the future with
something of similar quality. No wonder many Baby Boomers and their elderly
parents still have so much stuff!
Next:
why today’s young adults have so much less clutter than older generations do.