A few months ago I wrote about some constituents of Generation X (hip-hip-hooray, go team) having what the author Douglas Coupland once called Boomer Envy with regards to the accumulation of material wealth and the foundation of security that can bring. At the same time, however, my generation has demonstrated a knack for focusing much less on the job itself and more on the leisure it affords us/them far beyond the cubicle (Coupland’s “veal-fattening pen”).
This mindset and behavior has has given rise to a ‘leisure class’ of sorts that wears hundred-dollar tees and routinely rings up four-figure sales at the likes of Best Buy, Pottery Barn and, until recently, major retail music chains (goodbye yellow brick road … may they R.I.P.). In turn, we’re seeing more and more adrenalized gallerias, festival marketplaces and other retail candylands that are places to socialize as much as they are spaces to shop.
Not that the leisure class is a totally new concept and terminology. Economist Thorsten Veblen wrote a book titled The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899 (love that Wikipedia!). His essays provided what, in retrospect, appear to be prescient insights into budding consumerism in America, and he went so far as to apply some detailed accounts plucked from the annals of cultural anthropology to tie such leisurely behavior way back to tribal life.
Today, consumers, and particularly the GenX’ers with fattening disposable incomes, are increasingly spending more on leisure, and retail developers are finding more ways to make shopping a pursuit of leisure. In the twisty-turny parlance of marketing strategists and behavioral theorists, this is largely a function of non-utilitarian and hedonic outcomes, particularly with regards to a recreational shopper’s identity as a dimension of the consumer’s concept of self. Basically, the place you hang says a lot about you and your bros or BFF’s, like, totally.
Posted by: Colin Mangham