Page 151 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

136 . Anthropologist on Shopping Sprees

mesh shorts that had a yellow underlining. When he took the shorts up
to the counter, the saleswoman began to ring them up at $4.99, but
Teyvon stopped her and told her this was the wrong price. She checked
the price, and indeed, Teyvon had been right. With the purchase, it turned
out, he had his choice of "silly sippers," drink holders in funny shapes like
a bunch of grapes or a banana, with a curly straw attached. He chose a
dolphin-shaped silly sipper, saying, "I'll give this to my little cousin."
In Teyvon's case, his focus was on buying things he needed; being able
to stretch a limited sum of money to cover both a summer's worth of
school supplies and a new outfit was something that continued as he got
older. In 1993 he had a job working as a counselor at another summer
program. When I spoke with his mother, Vanessa, she told me with evi-
dent pride that he had spent his first paycheck (about sixty dollars) buy-
ing himself a pair of sneakers, groceries for the family, food for the fami-
ly cat, and had even started a savings account and was squirreling away
funds for a car. "And he didn't buy the regular cat food," Vanessa point-
ed out emphatically, "he bought the seven-dollar cat food!" At the time,
Teyvon was thirteen years old.

Shopping Trips in Children's Cultural Worlds
Just looking at shoe purchases is revealing. Seven girls and one boy bought
shoes with a portion of their money, and I became such a familiar sight at
the downtown Payless store (a discount shoe chain) that when the store
employees saw me approach behind a ten-year-old, they would greet me
by asking how my research was coming. The shoe purchases embodied
both these priorities of efficiency and buying for need: kids spent any-
where from $3.99 to $14.99 on shoes and often managed to buy several
additional items with the money that was left over. Namisha bought her
shoes, a pair of blue flats with embroidery on top, to wear to church.
Alan bought a pair of sturdy shoes for five dollars and boasted about it
for the rest of the day.
In contrast to the brand-name crazed consumers who live in the popu-
lar imagination, these children, while interested and knowledgeable
about status items, showed not the slightest inability to distinguish be-
tween an abstract wish for expensive, status goods and the practical reali-
ties of purchasing ability. Though kids demonstrated often and in a varie-
ty of ways their detailed knowledge of and interest in brands for clothing,
sneakers, food, cars, and so on, they showed little or no interest in pur-
chasing branded merchandise during shopping trips. This gap between
abstract wishes and concrete actions is too little noted in the literature on