The Waste Makers

IN THE LOBBY OF THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT of Commerce building a giant “clock” is running which brings joy to the American marketers who watch it ticking. It is one Washington frill they heartily endorse. Every seven and a half seconds a blue light flashes, as on a pinball machine, to indicate that a new baby has been born somewhere in the United States. Much more slowly, a purple light flashes—every twenty seconds—to indicate that some unfortunate American citizen has died. Another flashing light indicates the occasional arrival of an immigrant.

The key light is the white one, which shows the net results of all these changes. It flashes every eleven seconds to indicate that in that period one more human being has been added to the total United States population. Thus every eleven seconds marketers have gained one new prospect who will need food, clothing, shelter, and later on toy pistols, motorcars, hi-fi sets, powerboats, mixers, and casket. A large sign beside this clock during the late fifties read:

MORE PEOPLE
mean
MORE MARKETS

Actually, the United States population was exploding much more violently than that publication realized when it forecast in 1957 that the nation would have “Sixty Million More U.S. Consumers in 19 years.” Later census estimates indicated that nearly one hundred million more consumers might be added to the United States population in the next twenty years. People were living longer and longer. Couples were marrying younger and younger—and setting their sights on larger families. Girls now approaching the marriageable age expected to have one more child than their mothers did. The bumper crop of babies born after World War II would soon be marrying—in the mid-sixties—and were expected to produce a prodigious increase in the population.

Americans were prone to deplore population expansion in faraway lands. The fact was, however, that the United States was going through one of the greatest population explosions in the history of mankind. Its rate of population increase was as high as that of India and Italy, if not higher. Nearly three million people already were being added to the United States population each year, and that rate would grow. This was equivalent to adding annually a dozen brand-new cities the size of Omaha. If current trends continued, quite likely the United States population by the end of the century—or within the lifetime of most of us—would more than double the present population.

All this was viewed as progress. Babies by the millions would eliminate the possibility of serious depressions and serve as a backstop against possible miscalculation in overexpanding the capacity of factories. A few weeks after the stock market went into a slump at the beginning of 1960, financial analysts advised nervous investors to be of good cheer: with the population growth in prospect, stocks just had to go up in the long run.

The Advertising Council took the lead, appropriately, in spelling out the happy implications of the baby boom. To put consumers in a mood to step up their spending—and stop worrying—it organized a multimillion-dollar pepping-up campaign. One of the advertisements it prepared showed the picture of a stork—symbolizing population growth—on its nest. The caption read: “THIS BIRD MEANS BUSINESS.”

Such ads not only would help put the public in a confident buying mood but might encourage American families to feel they were being patriotic if they had large families, as well as proving their virility and old-fashioned Americanism. During the 1958 recession, the Advertising Council drew up seven basic reasons why Americans should be confident about their future. The Number One reason cited was “more people.”

Engineering News Record: “NEW POPULATION SCORE CARD CAN HELP YOU STRIKE IT RICH—The country’s booming population growth spells money in the bank for the alert construction man. . . . It means

More homebuilding

More community facilities

More roads

More commercial buildings

More factories

More transportation facilities.”

To marketers the vast emerging “youth market” was particularly tantalizing and challenging. For one thing, there were so many prospective customers involved. A vice-president of an advertising agency, McCann-Erickson, pointed out that by 1965 there would be 77,000,000 young people in the United States under the age of twenty. As a businessman and I drove past a new schoolyard filled with children, he joked: “Look at all those happy little dollar signs.”

Furthermore, these young people were becoming significant spenders. Most estimates agreed that teen-agers alone had become a ten-billion-dollar market just on the basis of their own spending power. And by 1970 they would be a twenty-billion-dollar market. Already each teen-ager could be counted on to spend more than $400 a year. It was no longer a market to be scorned as a nickel-and-dime thing.

Marketers were admonished to remember that all these millions of youngsters would one day marry and become really big spenders if properly nurtured. Catch them while their buying habits are forming! “GET THEM AT THE GET AGE!” one network trumpeted as it urged advertising men to consider its heavy juvenile audience in buying time. And Seventeen magazine stressed that its teen-age readers were at the “motivage” in acquiring lifetime buying habits.

Finally, the youth market was receiving new respect because marketers were realizing that youths are perhaps the most tempting target of all for selling because they tend to be even more impulsive, unskilled, and manipulatable than their parents. And parents are more prone than in the past to indulge their youngsters in whatever fads the marketers are able to stimulate. Teen-agers proved to be excellent prospects for deodorants, breast-developer hormones, hair dyes, home permanents, pimple removers, and pep pills. An executive of the Institute for Motivational Research pointed out that while teenagers might not believe in authority, they did believe in advertising.

The new mood of parents in wishing to indulge their children’s whims was noted several times by researchers for the Chicago Tribune’s study of attitudes of suburban homemakers. One mother in Park Forest explained: “My teen-age son likes to wear off-color sweaters and shirts with socks to match. Elastic belts are the fad now. My daughter must have a leather parka jacket. We want our children to enjoy life. Therefore, if they want something the other children have, we buy it for them.”

The Tribune’s report on Park Forest observed: “There is much buying for the children, and the things bought are determined by what the child wants, rather than what the parents want for him. What the child wants, in turn, is determined either by what the other kids have or by a particular item seen in advertisements. The parents see ‘giving the child what he wants’ in the way of material things as a positive thing.”

Then there was the booming youngster market for ice cream, soda pop, phonograph records, and toys—not to mention school desks, rubbers, etc. American youngsters by 1960 were receiving a billion and a half dollars’ worth of toys each year. During a good December day, American stores were jingling up six million dollars’ worth of toy sales every hour. The average American child received $26 worth of toys a year. In my own state of Connecticut, where toy consumption is highest, the average child received $36 worth. The head of a firearms manufacturing firm observed that by the time a boy is fifteen he has had between fifteen and twenty replicas of guns—and so is now a prime prospect for a real bullet-firing one.

Most of the major manufacturers of brassieres—and many minor ones—began promoting and selling bras to nine-and ten-year-old girls. By 1960, this had become an important market, as thousands of little girls had been conditioned by the emphasis on bosoms in advertising and elsewhere to worry about their flattish chests or to see bras as status symbols. The 28AA bra especially built for moppets was described by New York women’s editor Eugenia Sheppard as “a limp white object that looks like a dead rabbit and is positively the No. 1 gift, except for nylons, that ten-year-olds . . . crave these days.” She quoted a bra executive as explaining, “Of course, it’s all in their minds, since most of these bras have hardly any shape.... A few are padded for little girls with an inferiority complex about being flat.”

The really lush youth market, however, was the teen-age group. Its members were likely to have big wants, big allowances; and often they had their own earned, big-sized spending money. Life magazine surveyed the teen-agers’ spending habits and concluded that they were surrounding themselves with “a fantastic array of garish and often expensive baubles and amusements,” including 1,500,000 motorcars and $20,000,000 worth of lipstick. It cited the case of a seventeen-year-old girl in Van Nuys, California, as a “seller’s dream.” The consumption habits of this girl, Suzie, while high, were said to be fairly typical of girls in “upper-middle-income families in her town.” In the previous year, Suzie had received $1,500 worth of clothes and $550 worth of entertainment and $102 worth of beauty-parlor treatments. She owned seven bathing suits and had her own telephone. On summer-vacation days she loved to wander with her mother through department stores, picking out frocks or furnishings for her room or silver and expensive crockery for the hope chest she had already started. The publication said some people might think that American teen-agers were being spoiled to death, but it suggested that it was too late for parents to revolt. “Teenage spending,” it said, had become so important that “such action would send quivers through the entire economy.”

In its predictions of things to come as the sixties began, Printers’ Ink carried the headline: “AD AGENCIES WILL SET UP TEEN-AGE SECTIONS.” The publisher pointed out that teenagers constituted the fastest-growing market in the United States today, “offering astounding sales potential.” But, he added, “special advertising techniques must be developed to meet the challenge.”

One group of marketers making great gains with teen-agers was the cigarette makers. Fortune magazine, commenting on the way the cigarette industry had managed to bounce back from its slump following the cancer scare as it related to cigarette smoking, observed: “In part this [bounce back] is due to population gains, particularly in the big increase in the number of teen-agers, who appear to be smoking more furiously than ever before.”

Coffee makers meanwhile were working to recruit teen-agers. The National Coffee Association placed a sixteen-page insert in Scholastic magazine, which is geared to teen-agers. It gave tips on such commendable things as studying, safe driving, grooming, dating, health, and popularity, but printed a coffee recipe at the bottom of every page.

Perhaps the most significant—and, to me as the parent of three teenagers, most disquieting—move the marketers made to tap the teen-age market was to issue “junior” credit cards. Many department and other stores across the land have begun inviting Junior to wave his credit card and say, “Charge it!” Stores of one major chain began taking young debtors on the cuff even before they were old enough to shave—at the age of fourteen. Some stores made it clear that parental approval was not necessary in order to open a junior charge account. A department store in Iowa began advertising: “TEENAGERS! HAVE YOUR OWN CHARGE ACCOUNT!”

An official of the National Retail Merchants Association exhorted department stores to open up junior charge accounts and contended: “Teen-agers of today are America’s greatest natural resources” and offer a “made-to-order opportunity for the sales-minded credit executive.”

The stores inviting Junior’s patronage on a credit basis usually professed to be utterly uninterested in him as a customer. They just wanted to help him become a more prudent citizen by offering him an educational program in money management. A department store in Iowa heralded its junior credit plan by saying, “Its purpose is to give these young people experience in managing their budgets and to promote their early appreciation of good credit standing in their community.” On the other hand, the Council on Consumer Information commented on some of the plans that stores were making for Junior by asking: “Are they attempting to follow the Biblical admonition: ‘Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old he will not depart from it’?” The president of New York’s Bowery Savings Bank said that teaching the young to spend on credit “is something like teaching the young to use narcotics.”

This training of the young was also being pressed by one association of finance companies with the rather amazing cooperation of a national association of school officials. A booklet entitled Using Consumer Credit, widely distributed in American schools, upon inspection turned out to have been prepared with the help of two publicists working on behalf of this association of finance companies. It urged its student readers: “Don’t be afraid to use credit.”

A further development pleasing to marketers was that young people were marrying at an earlier age. The most frequent marriage age of girls had dropped to eighteen. And more and more college students were marrying instead of waiting until after graduation. This meant they usually were permitting their early years of marriage to be subsidized by parents. A young man no longer needed to establish his capability to be a breadwinner before marrying.

When a lad and lass prepare to marry, something pretty wonderful happens from the marketers’ viewpoint. Spending—by cash or credit—shoots up at a dazzling rate. The bride and groom spend, their parents spend, and their well-wishers spend. The couple of 1960 needs a shimmering brand-new home instantly, fully equipped. U.S. News & World Report put “new demand resulting from a marriage at about $13,600.” And it stressed that that figure was conservative. It broke down this figure as follows: A house costing an average of $10,000 was required—whether purchased or rented. Then there was at least $500 required for a car, and an average of $2,500 for equipping the new household with furniture and electric appliances. Finally—and this seems most conservative—there was $600 required for expenses incidental to the wedding such as ring, clothes, catering, and honeymoon. An enterprising sample-distribution outfit, Bridal-Pax, began handing out kits at marriage-license bureaus. These kits, distributed to hundreds of thousands of brides-to-be, contained samples of brand-name furniture polish, household cleaner, etc.—and, of all things, headache pills!

And so it was that most marketers were elated by the prospects of an additional hundred million consumers being added to the United States population within about two decades. Some alarmists wondered where jobs, resources, and living space would be found to support these additional hundred million people. These, indeed, were prickly problems to be pondered tomorrow. To talk about them today might jar consumer confidence. But could such questions wait?