Since my article posted today [The Standard of Living Bubble (and Why It's About to Go Pop!)], I think this event was meant especially for me. I went to Bath & Body Works at the mall this morning. Here I am, an adult with a job, a career, and I am going there to get a couple of items that I knew were 50% off, and I have a coupon that allows me to get a free item up to $13 with any purchase. So I am scrounging for sales and coupons to spend $10 and get items worth $33. In line ahead of me was a woman with her daughter, who was about 10 years old and very fat. She is buying a whole slew of expensive lotions, fragrances, etc., and she puts it on a charge card. The clerk asks the lady for her email to update the computer, and the lady tells her that it’s “her daughter’s purchase.” So the girl, with a huge smile on her face, gives the clerk her email and gets her bag of luxury-item goodies. The little girl turns around and her t-shirt said, in huge, obnoxious letters.

I Love to Shop
AND SPEND MY MONEY
All the Time

So here’s Mom, proactively teaching her child that at ten years old she too can have luxury items at premium prices, because life is all about spending money and accumulation, and you had better start early. Perhaps Mom should be teaching her young daughter about preserving her body and health for the long term, instead of blasting through the malls putting crap on charge cards? And I am sorry, but no little girl of the middle class needs to be taught that she can and should be a consumer of a business that caters to people who desire something a bit above the ordinary. Wal-Mart, Target, Meijers, etc. – they all offer great substitutes at much lower prices. Of course, these businesses now market to children, with special kid’s items, but that’s because the spend-o-rama of the bubble-addicted masses has made them a market. So don’t blame it on the marketing or the “evil” corporations.

The child’s obesity, the luxury items on a credit card, the t-shirt declaring that accumulation brings happiness — all signs of a depraved and appalling culture that is destroying a huge hunk of this generation. That woman’s brainless imprudence has become that poor child’s future.