Cake on Their Face

You just gotta love the rich and spoiled - throwing temper tantrums to secure the location, gleefully rejecting "loser wannabes" from the velvet ropes, and anxiously awaiting their fill-in-the-blank model luxury car. Coming of age is such an ordeal! MTV's My Super Sweet 16 is a total guilty pleasure because it's just so ridiculous and over the top. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are dropped, with these brats barking demands to their parents and party planners. The vision is HUGE with carefully calculated themes and the party being a complete celebration of self. So, are Millennials THAT full of themselves that they need to feel like Paris Hilton for a day, being famous just for a few hours? Do they need the validation that, yes, they are indeed special by throwing around the bling?

Sure the rich love to show off their money, especially the teens. They want to have the best party ever. One teen on the show said that they were so happy that their party is the first and she was thankful to her parents for having her early in the year because "no one will be able to top this! I dare them!" One girl wanted to secure a very specific location on a beach that cost $50,000 a day (and it was a 2 day affair) and her father was a little reluctant. What's a girl to do? Create a sales presentation of course! What happens when the centerpieces are not high enough? Call your mother a bitch and cry to daddy!

Millennials are probably the most marketed to generation that we've seen to date. From the days of "baby on board" they have been coddled and protected as precious cargo. They don't know of a time pre-internet and they are extremely brand focused and aware with product placement and in game advertising as part of their everyday world. They must have the latest, the greatest, most up to date thing.

What does this say to the rest of America that cannot afford such luxe affairs? Will we have a generation of neo-yuppies who aspire to be rich and fabulous? Will they all turn out to be Republicans?