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I hope you received some nice things from loved ones over the holidays. My family eschewed gifts and took a long-awaited trip to Asia. But I managed to keep up with the news back home and discovered it’s not only loved ones who buy nice things, it’s also personal shoppers at expensive department stores. A grinch-like Wall Street Journal investigation that ran on Christmas Eve revealed that personal shoppers and stylists at stores like Saks Fifth Avenue are empowered to select and purchase hundreds of thousands of dollars of expensive merchandise for clients and that clients often have no idea what’s being purchased and – even if they do – sometimes don’t bother to retrieve it.
The Journal report focused on Suhail Kwatra, Saks’ leading personal shopper in Boston, who “for two decades… dressed some of the city’s wealthiest and most famous people at the Saks store in Boston’s Prudential Center.” For one client, Kwatra bought millions of dollars of Chanel suits, fur coats, Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry, and Louis Vuitton handbags. He charged everything to her credit card, apparently without her knowledge because the clothing and accessories sat in the backroom for months. According to the Journal, another client noticed charges for expensive clothing he’d never purchased. He complained and Kwatra said his assistant had made an administrative error. But the charges kept coming and ultimately totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars. Kwatra was subsequently charged with fraud and larceny.
It's hard to understand why you wouldn’t cancel your card after being charged hundreds of thousands of dollars for merchandise you didn’t want or receive. It’s also hard to understand why you’d become a client after being insulted:
Deborah George met Kwatra roughly 20 years ago. She said she was walking through the Boston Saks store when Kwatra eyed her and said: “Your outfit is awful.” He suggested she try some Dolce & Gabbana items. “He changed my life,” George said.
But to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, I suppose the very rich are very different. Among many other things, they don’t have to worry about what is, by all accounts, America’s single biggest problem: affordability.
Our problem isn’t nearly as bad as some countries. Iran comes to mind, where inflation exceeds 40%, successful professionals can no longer cover monthly expenses, and protesters are taking to the streets. Or what happens next in betrodden Venezuela. Or most European countries where the cost of energy has doubled or tripled since Russia invaded Ukraine. But poll after poll demonstrate that cost of living is top-of-mind for most Americans and – building on affordability-driven Democratic gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia – likely to determine election results in the fall. Politico has dubbed 2026 “the year of affordability.”
The conversation has been loud and dominated by the rising cost of easily understood and quantified staples like eggs, milk, coffee, and beef. Other coverage has focused on healthcare, insurance, or childcare. As to who’s being hurt, most interviews or anecdotes involve parents with young children or seniors. Which makes sense: our most vulnerable need to be able to afford to eat. Also, seniors vote. But as a result, not nearly enough attention has been paid to the group that is at greatest risk of long-term harm. And that’s 20-somethings attempting to start independent lives.
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Over the past few years, the question of how the average young American can afford to live independently has become a head-scratcher. For 20-somethings, we don't hear much about the cost of groceries, perhaps because they're not usually shopping for a family. The discussion doesn’t revolve around the cost of transportation, perhaps because most remain on their parents’ car insurance and many live in big cities and don't need cars, or are used to Ubers and Waymos. We’re not even hearing an upswell over the eye-watering cost of college. For aspiring career launchers, affordability comes down to two things: a place to live and a good first job. And unfortunately, they’re caught between the Scylla of unaffordable housing and the Charybdis of a deteriorating market for entry-level employment.
Everyone agrees on the need to build more housing, but no one agrees on where or how. So the cost of housing continues to reach record levels. On New Year’s Eve, the Wall Street Journal celebrated 2025 as the first year with 10 home sales topping $100M. But the shortage is most significant for those who don’t already own a house or haven’t locked into an affordable rental. While this includes all demographics to some extent, it’s nearly universal for 20-somethings who face 1 BR rents over $2,000/mo. in nearly every major market and $4,000/mo. in tier 1 markets. As landlords typically require gross income of 3x rent, landing a 1 BR apartment requires a starting salary of $75K in most cities and $150K in New York and San Francisco. And forget about buying a house. The median price of a starter home is up 44% in the last five years. And if you’re lucky enough to find one, qualifying for a mortgage requires annual income over $100K.
One obvious challenge is that most career launchers don't have the benefit of a dual-income household. Many simulate it for a few years with roommates. But a 2 BR apartment is less affordable than a 1 BR that a couple can fit into. And part of the problem is inflated expectations. For many young people, acceptable housing includes space and amenities far in excess of a starter home or apartment from a generation ago. According to a 2024 Harris poll, 46% of Gen Z respondents believe that “no matter how hard I work, I will never be able to afford a home I really love.” Discussing the problem with my 15-year-old son Zev during a break from Stranger Things, he suggested he would find discounted rent by living in the Upside Down.
The alternative is to live at home – the prodigal child boomeranging back to the basement. Outside of 100% remote work, this imposes a geographical restriction on employment opportunities. Which adds insult to injury because not every career launcher was landing a $75K job. Far from it. While average wages are growing faster than prices, that hasn’t been the case for new and recent college grads. With the widening skills gap and experience gap, unemployment + underemployment for recent college grads was already over 60% before AI began changing the hiring calculus for junior workers and further diminishing this generation’s prospects.
Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with dozens of parents of college-age children. No one understands how there will be enough good jobs for all the college grads in the coming years; some estimates are as low as 10%. No one is confident their kids will be able to live independently after graduating. As for 20-somethings themselves, while they’d like to do as well as their parents, most think it’s unrealistic. Northwestern and University of Chicago researchers point at 20-somethings’ failure to save and proclivity for risky investments like crypto as evidence they may be giving up. Still, if the American Dream is no longer in reach, we would do well to avoid an American Nightmare.
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Affordability for everyone is a political problem, but affordability for 20-somethings is an existential problem in three respects:
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When one's expected lifestyle doesn't seem affordable, voters turn to extremes. Like Trump in 2024 or Mamdani in 2025, who proclaimed he will govern as a Democratic Socialist, whose supporters celebrated his inauguration with gear featuring cartoon images of characters urinating on the word capitalism – a fashion choice Suhail Kwatra might question – and who won the election with overwhelming support from 20-somethings. Apparently representative 20-somethings: in the New York Times coverage of Mayor Mamdani’s inauguration, no one at the party seemed to be in a relationship.
How do we stop positions that used to seem extreme from becoming widely accepted? There’s no single or simple answer. It probably starts with an abundance agenda – a term Mamdani used in his inaugural address – to make housing much more affordable. But building new housing is a hard slog and 20-somethings aren’t likely to see change overnight, or even over the course of a mayoralty.
A more powerful lever with more immediate results is to enlarge the abundance agenda to encompass new earn-and-learn pathways so young Americans can make money instead of spending money and taking on debt to launch their careers. Concurrently, we need to make students more attractive to prospective employers by mandating relevant work experience for students – even if unpaid – before they graduate into a full-time job search. For colleges and universities, this is worlds apart from listing available internships in career services or on Handshake. And very different still from the lip service that passes for internship strategy on most campuses. It does look a lot like a co-op experience for every student who wants one. Which means the number of employers offering work experience to students needs to increase by several orders of magnitude. Which means doing things very differently. Although schools – which can be somewhat closed off from the real economy – aren’t yet acting with much urgency, they will when they begin hearing from students and parents, and when prospective students begin voting with their feet.
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Saks Fifth Avenue personal shopper and stylist Suhail Kwatra didn’t have too many 20-something clients. But one was Zach Haroutunian, a student in Boston “when he began frequenting Saks Fifth Avenue for Balenciaga sneakers, Dolce & Gabbana bags and other designer clothes.” It was Zach who didn’t cancel his credit card after noticing charges for hundreds of thousands of dollars of merchandise he didn’t want or receive. And it’s Zach who apparently now runs a private investment firm. Zach was able to afford to take risks, or maybe his parents just handed him money to invest. Either way, it worked out for young Zach.
But what about families who can’t afford personal shoppers and stylists? When middle and upper-middle class parents have no clue how their kids are going to be able to afford to live independently in their late 20s and 30s, things are going to change. Things are going to change because the status quo is unsustainable. Things are going to change because 20-somethings are going to vote in Mamdani-like numbers.
Unless and until we address affordability for 20-somethings, unless and until we provide 21st century mechanisms for most young people to launch independent lives, the American experiment is at risk. Mayor Mamdani is a sign of things to come; Saks’ bankruptcy may be as well. And the Suhail Kwatras of the world may find their rude client acquisition ruse falling flat. Because we’ll all be wearing awful outfits.