• San Jose Mercury-News, Wednesday, October 21, 2009 10:38 AM

Columnist Chris O'Brien, a proud Gen Xer born between the early 1960s and late 1970s, took a trip with Kit Yarrow, a consumer psychologist at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, into the lair of the cohort that followed his -- the Gen Yers (aka, The Millennials). That would be the mall.

Yarrow and Jayne O'Donnell have written Gen Buy: How Tweens, Teens, and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail.

Yarrow tells O'Brien that the average member of Gen Y visits the mall four times a month and stays more than 90 minutes each time, compared with all shoppers who average three visits and 70 minutes. They're also very active online, using social networks to cadge advice from friends on what to buy. But you knew this.

Here's the take-away that, O'Brien says, "really floored me": Even after adjusting for inflation, Gen Y shoppers spend five times more than their parents did at the same age. "Generation Y is changing retail in a way we haven't seen before," Yarrow says. "I was naive when I started this. They have much more power than I thought."

In short, buying stuff is the way Generation Y has learned to express itself, O'Brien writes, which leaves him feeling somewhat depressed that "our society has bred a generation of shopping-obsessed, materialistic offspring." As if all us other Gens are ascetics, right?

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