LEISURE TIME

The Cost of Recreation in the 1980s

In the 1980s Americans continued to find new means of escape from their work schedules and to consider these means an important investment. In 1980 total personal expenditures for recreation were $149 billion; by 1989 the figure had risen to $250 billion. In 1980 sales of sporting goods totaled nearly $17 billion; by 1989 that total had risen to $45 billion. In 1980 Broadway shows took in $143 million; by 1989 their receipts totaled $262 million. Total motion-picture receipts in 1980 were $2.7 billion; by 1989 they had risen to more than $5 billion. In 1980 Americans spent $9 billion on books; by the end of the decade they were spending more than $19 billion. The leisure and entertainment industries were bigger businesses than ever before during the 1980s. According to Margaret Ambry, in 1988 American households spent $126 billion for entertainment, and the average house-hold devoted 5 percent of its total spending to entertainment costs. Middle-aged householders accounted for 72 percent of the entertainment market. Among people ages thirty-five to forty-four, overall spending for entertainment was nearly 50 percent above average. Those in the age group forty-five to fifty-four spent 80 percent more than the average household on sporting events. House-holders younger than twenty-five spent almost four times more than the average household on tape recorders and players.

Trends

Of the $126 billion Americans spent on entertainment, $50 billion was spent on sports. According to a 1988 report in Sports, Inc., that amount equaled "the sum of the output of goods and services generated by the sports industry." In the 1980s professional football teams received 60 percent of their revenues from television. The three major networks earned __BODY__.6 billion in sports advertising in 1986. At the same time, cable television increasingly gave viewers more choices in channels: by 1989 cable television was found in 60 percent of all homes with television sets. Sales of VCRs were at 475,000 at the beginning of the 1980s and soared to 11 million by the end of the decade. Rentals of movies on video became so popular that by 1985 income from video rentals for home viewing equaled the income studios made from movies shown in theaters. Another leisure activity that grew to popularity was attending professional wrestling matches featuring such muscle-bound giants as Hulk Hogan. As for games, Trivial Pursuit become a national craze in the early 1980s. Video games became another leisure-time favorite. Nintendo video games were played in 20 percent of all American homes, and one business publication reported that in the latter part of the 1980s Nintendo "stymied the growth of the traditional toy industry." During the decade more and more Americans were eating out. By 1986, 40 percent of the average household food budget was spent anywhere from McDonald's to the finest restaurants. Among yuppies, dining out became an especially noticeable trend. They favored restaurants featuring ethnic or natural foods. And Americans continued to travel in large numbers, both domestically and abroad. In 1987, 13 million Americans traveled outside the United States.

THE DECLINE OF LEISURE?

In The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (1991) Juliet B. Schor disagrees with researchers who claim that Americans had more leisure time in the 1980s than they had in earlier decades. According to Schor, Americans enjoyed less leisure in the 1980s than at any other period since the end of World War II. She says that a gradual but definite increase in working hours has hit most sections of the workforce, from professionals to low-paid service workers, creating "a profound structural crisis of time." According to Schor, "the media provide mounting evidence of 'time poverty,' overwork, and a squeeze on time.…Stress-related diseases have exploded, especially among women. Workers' compensation claims related to stress tripled during just the first half of the 1980s." The fast-paced corporate world of the 1980s emphasized commitment and initiative, Schor quotes one aggressive CEO as saying, "People who work for me should have phones in their bathrooms. She adds that complaints about a hectic lifestyle are particularly noticeable among the baby-boom generation. As for women, Schor's thesis is supported by the Statistical Handbook on Women in America, which notes that, although the majority of women work outside the home, "there was no significant reduction in household and family responsibilities in the last decade." These "super Moms" "have little free time and say they are just plain tired." Schor's thesis is also supported by the essayist Barbara Ehrenreich, who wrote whimsically that if yuppies as a group had died, as some reports claimed in 1987, it was because "they never rested, never took time to chew between bites or gaze soulfully past their computer screens." Though yuppies survived the decade, they frequently suffered from a malady that was widely reported in the 1980s: chronic fatigue syndrome, often called the "yuppie flu."

Sources:

Barbara Ehrenreich, The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed (New York: Pantheon, 1990);

Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1991);

Cynthia Taeuber, ed., Statistical Handbook on Women in America (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1991).

The Health Club Craze

The health clubs popular in the 1970s boomed in the 1980s, and more and more featured shiny upscale facilities marketed to attract yuppies—who were about the only ones who could afford memberships in the poshest of these clubs, which could cost as much as $2,000 per year. Yuppies as a group tended to be health conscious, and the fitness buzzword of the 1980s was "wellness," defined by Frank Rosato in his 1982 book, Fitness and Wellness: The Physical Connection, as "a global concept that emphasizes self-responsibility for achieving an optimal state of health and well-being." The Wellness concept included such factors as "stress management, nonuse of tobacco, nutritional awareness, alcohol and drug awareness, mental and emotional health, and physical fitness." Capitalizing on the yuppies' interest in Wellness, as well as their tendency to be attentive to physical appearance, the upscale health clubs offered high-tech, computerized equipment and all the latest exercise machinery, as well as personal trainers, aerobics classes, racquetball courts, squash courts, swimming pools, steam rooms, saunas, and masseurs and masseuses. Many featured fresh juice bars as well, capitalizing on the yuppies' interest in natural foods and nutrition; and, since many clubs were coed, the management often played up the social possibilities of membership. Indeed, for many yuppies, health clubs seemed nearly to replace singles' bars as prime places to meet members of the opposite sex. Some of the best-known clubs were the Sports Club in Los Angeles and the Health and Racquet Club in (HRC) New York City. In 1986 a New York Times advertisement for the New York Health and Racquet Club featured a picture of Olympic gold medal winner Peggy Fleming, who was quoted as saying, "I strive for perfection, so when I'm in New York, I go straight to the place where I can challenge my body, the place where I can use the facilities and get the professional help that keeps me fit." The ad boasted that the HRC "offers over 100 exercise classes every week…, karate, nutritional and quitsmoke programs and spas that sparkle with style and luxury…and individualized nautilus and professional one-to-one training." What one wore in such up-scale clubs was considered important, and many patrons made sure to bring the right sneakers, sweatpants, leggings, tanktops, and leotards. For such people L. L Bean offered a fitness/fashion catalogue, The L. L. Bean Guide to Fitness. Articles in magazines such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar advised their readers how to shop for the right health club and how to choose the right exercise programs. In 1986 a New York Times Magazine article quoted John McCarthy, executive director of a health club trade group, who noted, "In every major city there are large clubs and small exercise studios that weren't there five years ago." Chicago had so many health clubs that it tried to levy what was dubbed a "yuppie tax" on membership fees, so the city could increase its tax base. (The attempt was unsuccessful.) Estimates of the numbers of health clubs throughout the nation in the mid 1980s ranged from four thousand to thirteen thousand.

Break Dancing

At the same time that fashion and leisure trends were filtering down from the upper classes, the hip-hop culture of African American neighborhoods of the Bronx and Brooklyn was having a major influence on teen culture. Break dancing and rap music became popular nationwide. According to a 1986 article in Rolling Stone, break dancing reflected the multicultural influence of blacks from Barbados, Jamaica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and North America. Break dancing was most often accompanied by rap lyrics and music. It involved improvised, highly athletic, acrobatic dance movements, and the dancers, almost always male, often competed to see who could make the best moves. The baggy shorts and shirts and backwards caps worn by break-dancers and rap musicians became as popular with teens nationwide as the hip-hop culture's music and dancing.

RUBIK'S CUBE

Invented in the 1970s by a Hungarian professor of design, Ernö Rubik, the toy that was sold in the United States as the Rubik's Cube became a popular phenomenon in the early 1980s. The Rubik's Cube was the most challenging—and for many people, infuriating—puzzle ever to achieve mass-market success. Composed of twenty-six smaller cubes, or "cubies," the cube presented nine colored squares on each of its six faces. When the cube was purchased, each face was of a uniform color, different from that of any of the other faces; after the faces were rotated randomly, the cube would end up a jumble of colors—and most people had no idea how to restore it to its original state. People spent hours, if not days, rearranging the cube in dozens of the 43,252,003,274,489,855,999 (43 quintillion) positions other than the one correct position before achieving success or giving up.

The puzzle could be solved, of course, as Rubik and many others demonstrated. People who had figured out a system for solving the puzzle wrote best-selling books on how to do it, and some held contests with lubricated cubes to see who could solve it the fastest. (In a world championship contest in Budapest in 1982, a high-school student from Los Angeles solved the puzzle in 22.95 seconds.)

In the United States the Rubik's Cube was the 1980s equivalent of the hula hoop of the 1950s. Millions of cubes were sold, as was a Cube Smasher designed "to beat it into 43 quintillion pieces." A fake commercial on the television show Saturday Night Live featured a Rubik's Grenade, which had to be solved in ten seconds or it would explode. Mathematics professors used the cube in classes to illustrate the finer points of group theory.

Rubik, who became the richest individual in Hungary from international sales of the cube, devised other puzzles that were even more difficult than the Rubik's Cube. While sales were respectable, nothing matched the incredible success of his first invention.

Source:

Anne Steacy, "Rubik's Newest Twist," Macleans, 99 (29 September 1986): 52;

John Tierney, "The Perplexing Life of Erno Rubik," Discover, 7 (March 1986): 81-88.

Sources:

Margaret Ambry, Consumer Power: How Americans Spend Their Money (Ithaca, N.Y.: New Strategist Publications, 1991);

A. Bartlett Giani atti, Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games (New York: Summit Books, 1989);

William R. Greer, "Finding the Right Health Club," New York Times Magazine, 28 September 1986, pp. 102, 103, 107;

Charles Panati, Panati's Parade of Fads, Follies, and Manias: The Origins of Our Most Cherished Obsessions (New York: Harper & Row Perennial Library, 1991);

Robert Farris Thompson, "Hip-Hop 101," Rolling Stone-, no. 470 (27 March 1986): 95-100.