How BMWs Became A Status Symbol

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This is an excerpt from Engines of Change, chapter 10, "The BMW 3 Series: TheRise Of The Yuppies And The Road To Arugula," by Paul Ingrassia. It came out thisweek.Soccer moms weren’t the only Americans in the late 1980s andthe 1990s more or less defined by their automobile. There were also the yuppies. The termstood for “young urban professionals,” a new generation of adults withhigh-paying jobs in business, finance, medicine, law, and the like.After theword “yuppie” was coined around 1980, it gave rise to such derivativesas buppies (black urban professionals) and guppies (gay urban professionals). There weremore to come. Many yuppies enjoyed spendthrift lifestyles in the early years of theirmarriages because they were DINKs, which meant Double Income, No Kids. As time went by andone spouse traded his or her career (usually hers) for homemaking, some free-spendingDINKs became ORCHIDs: One Recent Child, Hideously In Debt. ORCHIDS sometimes became theSITCOMs: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Marriage. So went the alphabet-soupsociology of the day. Yuppies, distinguished not only by their age and theiroccupations, were people who had to buy to live, just as sharks had to swim to breathe.But they couldn’t buy just ordinary stuff. Theirs was a restless and creativematerialism, a constant search to find the most distinctive and expensive version of justabout anything. They favored $2 Dove Bars over 50-cent Eskimo Pies. Their beer was AnchorSteam instead of Budweiser. They chose Macallan single malt over J&B, Camembert overKaukauna Club, Air Jordans over sneakers, Starbucks over Dunkin’ Donuts, Perrier andSan Pellegrino over tap water. And so on. By buying upscale versions of everything, theyseparated themselves from the unenlightened, the uneducated, and the unwashed. And theywere proud of it.Yuppie pride surfaced one night in the late 1980s in AnnArbor, Michigan, when four young friends went out for a beer. After a couple rounds, oneof them, a software developer, blurted out, “Listen, I get up in the morning, put onmy French-cut suit, climb into my BMW, and drive to my high-tech job. Now, I ask you, whatdo I have in common with you people?” Not much after that outburst, as itturned out.Just being expensive wasn’t enough to make something anobject of yuppie desire. It had to be the right kind of expensive. Yuppies needed stuffdifferent from what their parents had owned. In the case of cars, their parents hadcoveted Cadillacs as yuppies were growing up. But few things were more offensive to yuppiesensibilities than Cadillacs with vinyl roofs and wire wheels. “The sort of personwho buys a BMW would rather be force fed Velveeta cubes than drive a Cadillac,” theLos Angeles Times observed in 1987, when it reported on “The New StatusSeekers in the 1980s.”Yuppie gear had to provide benefits, real orimagined, beyond the comprehension of the hoi polloi but knowingly appreciated bythe cognoscenti. In 1987 BusinessWeek reported on the booming sales ofhigh-priced pet food. Many yuppies indulged their cats (Himalayans or Bengals, no doubt)with haute cuisine called Amoré and Fancy Feast instead of (sniff, sniff) PurinaCat Chow. It was what “you might expect from BMW aficionados,” the magazineexplained.BMW’s image makers complained about the characterization, butit was like trying to punch holes in Jell-O (a substance, like Velveeta, that never passedthrough yuppie lips). So what if a few yuppies liked Saabs, Volvos, and Mercedes-Benzes?Nothing came close to defining the young affluents of the 1980s and 1990s like their BMWs.Crashing into a BMW, went one joke of the day, was “vehicular yuppie-cide.” In1985 a group of young San Franciscans threw a “Yuppie cotillion” that theypublicized with the unauthorized use of the BMW logo, declaring that it stood for“Beauty. Money. Wealth.” The suggested dress for men was black tie withNikes.Such affectations defined yuppies as “bourgeois bohemians,”in the words of David Brooks, author and New York Times columnist. He shortenedthe term to “Bobos.” They had mastered the oxymoronic art of being downscaleelitists, somehow blending the seemingly irreconcilable worlds of WASP and hippiecultures, of high-church music and grunge rock, to form the new American establishment.One Midwestern yuppie was so taken by the term that he even named his dog Bobo. (The dogwas a dachshund, abreed developed in Germany, just like BMWs.) Continue Reading

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