The Death of the Yuppie. (Finally.)
“It feels like we’re seeing a rolling-over of how people view the world,” says David Rankin, a South Jersey-based financial planner I call whenever I want to know what the rich and fabulous are up to with their money. “That sense of entitlement people had is going away.”
Going, going, gone. The only winners over the holidays appear to have been Walmart, where sales were up 2.4 percent, and Costco, with sales up seven percent. After years of taking a pounding for its crappy cheapo cuisine, McDonald’s seems to have a new cachet, with profits up 11 percent. And Rankin says that across the financial spectrum, his clients are shutting down their credit cards: “They’re taking one less vacation, eating out a little less. They’re not eating cat food, but they’re not spending the way they were. … It’s like the herd has decided things are bad.”
In part, this is a matter of practicality and psychology. The deflated Dow makes it a lot more appealing to steer your Audi toward BJ’s than Neiman Marcus. But there’s also something deeper going on with the zeitgeist — something represented locally by that conspicuous non-consumer in Chestnut Hill, and nationally by Barack Obama’s move into the White House.
Admittedly, this is a paradox, since on the surface Obama appears to be Yuppie-in-Chief — a guy with twin Ivy League degrees, a health-club habit and an avowed affinity for arugula. But listen closely to what Obama says, and it’s clear that our first Benetton president (biracial, raised abroad, Citizen of the World, blah blah blah) has a set of values that echoes an earlier era’s. Time and again on the campaign trail and in his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama referred to fairness and sacrifice and unity and the common good — words and ideas our grandparents lived by but that seem to have faded from the scene somewhere around the time Donald Trump raised his first garish building. Smart politics on Obama’s part? No doubt — he orated all the way to the Oval Office. But his invocation of his own grandparents and their Depression-era values sounds less like a message crafted by a devious speechwriter than like something Obama himself has used to steer his life.
So what does all this mean for us Philadelphians, and for Philadelphia? It somehow feels like we’re at the dawn of a new era — one that, like Obama, will be an intriguing blend of new and old, and that, thankfully, will have little to do with either Aruba or arugula.
THE TERM "YUPPIE" has faded from favor over the years, in part because the original “young urban professionals” are no longer so young, in part because other adjectives and phrases (upscale, affluent, soccer moms) have replaced it in the popular lexicon. But they all spring from the same ancestral family tree — one with deep roots in Philadelphia. Five years ago, on what I deemed to be (not completely arbitrarily) the 20th anniversary of the yuppie, I wrote a piece for this magazine chronicling the Philly pedigree of the Y people. One of the observers I spoke with was Cathy Crimmins, who in 1983 wrote a seminal piece for the City Paper (and who later wrote a book) about this new breed of young professionals she was seeing around town.
