I was in Pasadena satarday night at an amazing frozen yogurt place and the girls in front of us were chat sting with the yogurt girl about how they couldn’t wait to start working—preferably there. The yogurt girl giggled about how she has been working since she was thirteen. Thirteen?!? Wtf. And who is excited about getting a job?
But the kids who start working earlier and earlier are only working so that they can spend money, not to save it up, because if your parents don’t supply you with nice enough clothes—based upon your peers definition, then you are socially worthless. Gucci, Prada, Gag Me.
We all know that teens judge each other for the more brands they wear and how much money they or their families have. Brands designate a social position. And this new brand obsession has changed teenage leisure time because middle-class kids work to catch up to their wealthier peers.
An excerpt from Quart’s book illustrates this well. “Laurie, a seventeen-year-old from Denver, worked four hours a day her senior year just so she could spend $250 a month on clothes, ‘People know who has money at school,’ she says entirely clad in Abercrombie & Fitch. ‘When there’s a party people look at each others stuff and check out how much it cost. At my school, you can only justify not having money by being good at something else.’”
The popular impression today is that teens are capitalism’s happy children, but as it is put in Quart’s book, “American teens’ heavy labor is the logical extension of materialism. Teens are the new proletariat—kids who work primarily to consume more goods.
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