Desperate Times, Desperate Measures

As trustafarians artificially inflate prices across the city, regular working-class joes are forced to pilfer household goods from their parents, as reported by the Times’ Style Section:

A generation ago, adult children visiting their parents’ homes might have left with a Tupperware container of lasagna. Today, many of them stealthily make off with toiletries, groceries, sometimes clothing and even furniture. It is an apparently widespread practice, born of a sense of entitlement among young adults – and usually amusedly tolerated by parents – that gives new meaning to the phrase “home shopping.” Like most adults, the pilferers have set up their own households, but they seem not to have given up the expectation that their parents should provide for them in certain ways. They loot their parents’ houses to cut costs, or because they would rather not pay for incidentals. Or because they want things with sentimental value.

Sometimes the children ask if they can take things. Often they do not.

. . .

Stephen Kunken, 34, an actor in New York who is an admitted “pillager” of his parents’ possessions, said he rationalized that his parents had too much stuff and that he was both “trimming the fat” and “liberating” things. “I thought: ‘These poor things. These are never going to get used. I’m going to liberate them and bring them into the city,’ ” he said.

Through the years Mr. Kunken has taken briefcases, a slide projector, an electric toothbrush, razors, blank tapes, paper towels, soap and bottles of wine.

His parents did not know their wine was missing until he served it to them at a party at his Brooklyn apartment. “We had our own wine that he stole,” his mother, Ginny Kunken, said. “It was very nice that he invited us.”

His parents are accustomed to finding things missing. “What have they taken?” said her husband, Fred Kunken, a dentist from Upper Brookville, N.Y., referring to Stephen and his 37-year-old brother, Jeffrey. “What haven’t they taken? They’ve taken just about every bit of my clothing, from my underwear and socks to –”

“Bathing suits,” his wife interjected, laughing.

“All of a sudden my razors disappear,” Dr. Kunken said. “Shaving cream disappears. It’s gotten to the point that if I see them coming, and if it’s something I just got that I want to wear, I hide it.”

To be sure, it’s quite possible that the subjects’ professions have something to do with it. Age, Sex, Profession and Neighborhood of interviewees in article follows:

• F, 24, Fashion Model, Manhattan
• M, 34, Actor, Brooklyn
• F, 26, Musician, Brooklyn
• F, 31, Actress, [No Neighborhood Mentioned]
• F, 24, “campus recruiter for a financial institution,” [No Neighborhood Mentioned]

You see where we’re going with this . . .

Is there any end in sight? Researchers are optimistic:

The phrase “emerging adulthood” does imply that these sticky fingers will eventually become independent. Is there a specific age by which one should finally accept the responsibility of paying one’s way? Psychologists and economists point to the early or mid-30’s.

“By the early 30’s the assistance that kids are receiving from their parents dissipates strongly,” said Robert F. Schoeni, an associate professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “The kids are establishing their careers, they’re getting better-paid jobs, getting married.”

Ms. [Nicole] Atkins, who has decorated her Brooklyn apartment with shot glasses, candles, Mexican marionettes and boxing gloves from her parents’ house in Neptune, N.J., says she will cease her home shopping once she gets married and has a family.

“If I had kids and a husband, and I was still taking stuff from my parents,” she said, “that would be really lame.”