Yuppies Are Thriving Despite Market Dive

Written off by skeptics since the October, 1987, stock market crash, yuppies are alive and well, said a research firm devoted to tracking the BMW-and-tortoise-shell-eyeglasses set.

Young urban professionals had spent most of their adult lives enjoying the prolonged economic growth and optimism of the 1980s. Many of them, therefore, were financially and psychologically shellshocked when the stock market plunge wiped out hundreds of billions of dollars in paper profits.

But six months later, yuppies are still spending freely on home video equipment, high-tech appliances and trendy necessities for their children.

Since the trauma of Black Monday, however, they also are cuddling up more often in their condos.

Those and other conclusions are advanced by Yuppie University, actually a marketing and research firm based in a Century City high-rise that keeps a constant finger on the yuppie pulse with an extensive data bank bulging with media analyses and trend forecasts.

Despite the Wall Street carnage and resulting jokes about pigeons having an advantage over yuppies by still being able to make a deposit on a BMW, yuppies “have a continuing high profile and have come to represent a life style that is emulated by many,” Yuppie University proclaims.

Yuppies Well Known

YU backs up its assertions with a recent Roper poll showing that 60% of Americans know about young urban professionals, while only 34% could name the secretary of state.

But not everyone knows them, the researchers say. The media, they argue, have been bashing yuppies for their “over-zealousness, self-indulgence and, worst of all, conspicuous consumption.”

Esquire magazine earlier this year proclaimed yuppies dead or at least passe, but said there was actually much to admire in them.

“The source of the anger against them is not to be found in their own obnoxiousness or selfishness or hypocrisy, none of which is particularly striking. The source of the anger against them is to be found in the falseness of what they have been made to represent,” the magazine said.

People who sell things have plenty to like about yuppies, according to YU.

Yuppies have concluded that fitness is necessary for success, hence a flood of bucks to health clubs, natural food and cardiovascular maintenance.

Reproducing Actively

And yuppies’ reproducing “is potentially the most important marketing event since the original Baby Boom,” YU said.

“No expense is being spared on bringing up baby: upscale clothes, toys, ‘learning experience,’ health and fitness classes, educational pursuits and long-term vocational plans.”

Politically, yuppies are pro-Establishment capitalists, but they embrace liberal causes such as world peace and disarmament.

But the yuppies’ vision is turned mostly inward.

“At the core of the yuppie mentality is the desire to fully understand themselves,” which critics might label self-absorption, which translates to time and money on self-improvement schemes, psychological evaluation, therapy and analysis.

But YU said without such self-devotion, “Yuppies would not have adapted so extraordinarily well to the pressures of working hard and, as a reward, playing hard.”