Garden centers: Embrace the scuppie

I’m a seasoned journalist, so I sometimes play the part of cynic. It’s something my journalism professors injected into their lessons each day, and it prepared me for the real world. I find sarcasm wickedly funny. So when I read a USA Today story about scuppies -- a Socially Conscious, Upwardly-mobile Person -- I laughed until my side hurt.

Chuck Failla, president of a Connecticut financial planning firm, coined the phrase. Scuppies are basically green yuppies. Failla notes, “Yuppies have moved to the suburbs, spawned families, and are spending copious amounts of their disposable income at socially conscious outlets like Whole Foods and The Body Shop. They’ve begun thinking about bigger, more important issues than whether to opt for the headlight cleaners on their BMW X5s. It’s become not just admirable, but downright fashionable to be concerned about global warming and the plight of the Amazon rainforest, to support organic farming and the rights of workers in Third World countries.”

To help the legion of yuppies make the transition to scuppie, he wrote The Scuppie Handbook: A Practical Guide to Living Well while Doing Good. Did he write it with tongue firmly planted in cheek? Maybe not. After the giggling ceased, I realized there’s more to Scuppies than a witty caricature.

Scuppies love money and conspicuous displays of affluence, Failla says, so why not appeal to their prosperous side and their ecological side. After all, the first paragraph of The Scuppie Manifesto reads, “It is the unalienable right of every man, woman and child to wear stylish, 100 percent organic, sweatshop-free cotton apparel, and to feel befittingly righteous about it. There should be no need to choose between a car’s speed and fuel economy; comfort and conservation; luxury and sustainability.”

If BMW and Ralph Lauren can make oodles from the yuppies, growers and garden centers can profit from the scuppies.

-- Kelli