Apparently it costs 9,000 of our English pounds to keep a teenager for a year – I’m sure the Curmudgeon can translate this into American as he has had/is having 4 kids through this larval stage and has been there, seen that and can no longer afford the T-shirt.
But why is this? David Mitchell has done some thinking on the subject and has picked the pimple quite accurately thus:
But massive teenage spending has become the premise on which much of our economy, and popular culture, is based….. One of the fastest growing areas in our economy in the years leading up to the crunch was the selling of crap to twats. Why waste a fortune expensively marketing carefully designed products to the thrifty middle-aged with long-established spending patterns when you can make a quick million pushing ringtones and cheese strings to kids?
Exactly. Anyone who has endured commercial TV in the last few years will have felt distinctly untargeted if they’re over the age of 18 and things ain’t going to get any better.
Of course, in my day things were different and we used to make our own entertainment and [fades into senile ramblings about lost youth......]
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Well, only three are completely through the teen years — the other two are 19 and 16.
According to my handy Google currency converter, 9,000 pounds comes to $12,420 USD. Which is not quite, but depressingly close to the weekly grocery bill when the kids are home for the holidays….
But they were selling to us, too, back long ago when we were in that favored demographic. In my day it was the new shape in stone hand axes. All the kids in the next cave had them, so we absolutely had to have them in ours too. I remember the grumbling well: The regular, old-fashioned hand axe will skin a woolly mammoth just as well… better maybe….
Five?
Truly you are a saint Curmudgeon.
Tell me it gets better…..