Twice each year — once in the spring and once in the fall — the international banking firm Piper Sandler publishes its “Taking Stock with Teens” survey. The questionnaire is administered to 10,000 teenagers (average age 15.8), the objective to find out how young people are spending money.
Should we be giving investors the skeleton key for marketing to children? I don’t know that I can say. But the results are kind of incredible. It reads almost like a good Agatha Christie story. There are quiet “oh, I see” moments (teens still use mostly cash — of course they do, they can’t open bank accounts), as well as twists that, frankly, send me reeling. Favorite celebrity? Adam Sandler.
For context, three of Adam Sandler’s most recent movies are Hubie Halloween, Uncut Gems, and Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation.
For context, remember that the name of the firm is “Piper Sandler,” which compels me to imagine that this result is a dizzying fluke of word association. But anyway.
I don’t know why this survey captures my attention so much. It would’ve been last month that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim celebrated its tenth anniversary, which I mention because that game was as transformative for me as church, or Septimus Heap, or those days when the ice cream truck would come to my middle school. I knew I loved video games and played them often, but I tracked the release of Skyrim like a stormchaser. I watched press interviews and gameplay demos. Before, I had a handful of games I enjoyed, but found them mostly by scrolling through the Wii Shop until I found a title I’d heard of on YouTube. Skyrim wasn’t just the first video game release I’d followed. It was the first time I had felt like an expert, maybe ever. I remember facing the camera towards a river, and quoting to my older brother something I’d heard the developer say about the graphics of the water.
Skyrim turning 10 didn’t make me feel old, not like the Piper Sandler survey does. Or, given that I’m only 22, it didn’t make me feel like I was aging. With respect to movies and video games and TV shows, something that came out five years ago might as well have come out 15, or 25 years ago. They’re not “new,” so they’re “in the past.” History is very flat to me.
But I didn’t know who Emma Chamberlain was, and how am I supposed to reckon with the fact that the number one snack among teenagers is Goldfish. Goldfish. As a young person, it’s easy for me to view my cohort as, somehow, fundamentally in opposition to the generation before us. The Piper Sandler survey is a clue that, when my hairline recedes and my nose is cratered burgundy, the challenge will not be learning to appreciate young people. It will be learning to understand them at all.