Wall Street wizards aren't the only ones benefiting from the robust economy of the past several years. To find some really big spenders, head to your local shopping mall and find a teenager.
They're hard to miss. Here's Steve Schwager, 15, of Milwaukee, about to cough up $30 for a Sony PlayStation game. Downstairs, Angie Counsell, 17, considers whether to pay $74.99 for an Abercrombie & Fitch sweater.A few miles away, Saytoria Mathis, 17, pulls a pair of jeans from the rack at Old Navy and heads to the dressing room. She figures she spends between $150 and $175 a week on such things as clothes, CDs, jewelry and shoes.
"My mom says I have too many clothes to wash," she says as she whips the jeans over her shoulder and grabs the sleeve of a T-shirt that has caught her fancy.
A recent survey by Ohio State University for the U.S. Department of Labor shows that the average teenager gets a staggering $50 a week in disposable income from parents.
This is not "allowance" in the old-fashioned sense of the word, where the parents pass out the money in one lump at the beginning of the week. More likely, the money is doled out in dribs and drabs, a little here for a movie, a little there for a new dress for the winter dance.
"Wow!" exclaims June Schroeder, a certified financial planner when told of the survey results. "That says to me that we have gone over the edge."
Researchers randomly selected 9,000 teens from around the country and followed them for two years, tracking how much money their parents gave them. It did not consider money they might have earned at jobs or money they saved.
Though many teenagers reported getting either no allowance or an allowance in the $10 to $20 range, the amount of money that many parents actually gave over the course of the week was substantially higher, the study says.
Like the general economy, the abundance has not been felt by all teenagers, Jay Zagorsky, one of the authors of the study, said in a recent interview on radio's "Face the Nation."
Nearly two-thirds of those interviewed got $7 a week or less from their parents, he said. The wealthier the parents, the more likely their teenagers were to get more. Kids from families with incomes of $100,000 or more typically got up to $175 a week, according to the study.
It's also tax-free. In comparison, a person working a 40-hour week at the federal minimum wage level of $5.15 an hour would earn $206, before taxes.
"Money burns a hole in my pocket," Schwager says when asked why he spends three days a week or more at the malls. He's in good company.
Teenagers in the United States spent $141 billion in 1998 -- up 60 percent from just five years before, Labor Department statistics show. That number was expected to climb to $160 billion last year. The teen spending in 1998 was 3.7 percent of total consumer spending of $3.8 trillion, according to the Labor Department.
Michele Cody, a certified financial planner, says parents send the wrong message to their kids when they give them too much money.
"I look at the affluence in this country, and it makes me recognize that people have lost their perspective on what is important," she says. "It takes hard work to earn money. We are harming our kids if we don't teach them that."
Both Cody and Schroeder recommend giving children a weekly allowance of a dollar for each year of their age. A 15-year-old, for example, would get $15. They both say to set aside 10 percent for charity. The rest should be divided into three categories: instant gratification, long-term savings for things such as college or a car, and short-term savings for bigger ticket items such as a CD player.
Back at the malls, those suggestions hold little appeal to people such as Schwager and Mathis.
"I want it when I want it," Mathis says. Besides, she adds, if she pouts enough, she knows her mom or her grandmother will come through with $20 for whatever she wants that day.
Counsell confesses that she never really pays back her parents, either.
"It's a little game we have," she says with a smile. "They ask, and I tell them I'll get them the money soon."
And when they don't have cash in hand, more and more teenagers are flashing credit cards, the mall shoppers say.
Trappings of the good times abound. Jenny Schiellack, 18, and Tamara Thimmel, 18, figure 75 percent of the upperclassmen at Arrowhead High School in the Town of Merton, where they are seniors, have their own cars.
Schroeder says she worries about how all this largess will affect the kind of adults these teenagers will become.
"We are building castles out of sand," she says. "We are creating a generation of kids influenced too heavily by Madison Avenue with no experience in managing their wants. It's me, me, me. I'd like to see how they will take care of us when we are old."
But Mathis is not thinking about the future. She's fixed on right now, this minute, and there is a more pressing concern that has her attention.
"Felicia!" she shouts to her friend in the next row. "Did you see these vests?"
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.