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.
