The decade of the 1980s...
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The decade of the 1980s brought an amazing range of consumer goods into being. The period was marked by "high tech" in a way that was unprecedented. It was also marked by the sudden rise of a group commonly known as "yuppies" -- young urban professionals. To be a yuppy meant certain things -- a high income relative to previous generations, a lot of credit available to them, and the desire to buy the wide variety of consumer goods. Personal computers, CD players, video-cassette players and recorders, and wide-screen televisions, among other items, were all in high demand. Yuppies became known for buying foreign-made automobiles, and new makes and models, with intriguing names, began to appear: Lexus, Accura, Infiniti. The 1980s was a period of tremendous financial growth and access to wealth -- for some. But for many more, it was a period of losing ground, not gaining it, and there was a crash waiting to happen. Not only did many individuals ride the corporate wave into credit chaos, but so did corporations themselves, and even the government. It is now perhaps a truism to say that we have to pay for the 1980s. There were those who thought the wave would go on forever. But it didn't. All waves eventually crash on the beach. None of us can say with surety that "today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and get gain," for we do not know about tomorrow. -- Johnson-Hoy
