The term yuppie is an oft-used one here on the SDMB but what does it mean to you. I could be wrong but are a significant proportion of dopers not yuppies? What separates you from a yuppie? Is someone a yuppie just because they make more money than you do or because they like different art to you?
Will anyone on here admit to being one?
A yuppie knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing–to coin a phrase. A yuppie is terribly concerned about having the RIGHT job, living in the RIGHT area of town, driving the RIGHT car, eating at the RIGHT restaurant, drinking the RIGHT kind of overpriced, overrated hooch, then working out at the RIGHT overpriced gym.
Yuppies spend all their time worrying about what other yuppies think of them. They spend time with people they can’t stand, because they’re the RIGHT people. Yuppies are very careful to know only the exact RIGHT amount about the RIGHT issues and have only the RIGHT opinions thereof. Yuppies won’t be caught dead doing something declasse, no matter how fun it might be–if one of their friends saw them there they’d never live it down you see. Yuppies make a lot of money, but they’re always mortgaged to the hilt because there’s always some new status symbol they have to strive for in order to achieve the next rung of yuppiehood. Yuppies have children in order to send them to the RIGHT school, to make sure they wear the RIGHT clothes and reflect well on their parents’ abilities as good yuppie providers.
My boss is a yuppie to the hilt and the poor bastard envies the hell out of me because I wear what I want, eat what I want, watch the movies I like and tell anyone I don’t agree with to go fuck themselves. He marvels that I spend my free time on things I like to do and have no one around to hector me into activities I “should” do. He is constantly amazed that I seem to suffer no ill effects from my FU philosophy and that I in fact enjoy a much more relaxed and textured quality of life than the thin gruel that is his existence. He has a lot more money than I do, but I’m orders of magnitude happier. But he has a lot more pairs of plaid golf pants and polo shirts than I… 
I tend to think of a Gen-X Young Urban** P**rofessional who is quite taken with, (but NOT necessarily obsessed with) status, particularly as displayed in stuff*. It is a term of amusement rather than disdain. (There are certainly enough Boomers and “Greatest Generation” and the folks between them who are infatuated with status and stuff.)
(I do get further amused by complaints by younger people who identify Yuppies with Boomers. There are probably some younger Boomers who qualify as yuppies, but by the time the word was coined, the vast majority of boomers had three kids, pot bellies, and crabgrass to worry about. Some had kids in (or out of) college and grandkids.)
Yeah, I don’t think of yuppies strictly as young urban professionals, but those who are overly concerned with other people’s opinion of them and their status. My older sis is certainly a young urban professional, but doesn’t give a shit if she’s wearing Prada or Target brand.
I think of yuppie-ism as an extension of the “cliques” in high school- you’ve got to know the right people, you’ve got to wear the right clothes, go to the right events, and have the right toys.
Really? It was coined in the early 80s, IIRC. Even the oldest Boomers would have had school-aged kids and no or few grey hairs.
Sounds like everyone I met while I lived in Southern California. 
The oldest Yuppies in 1983 were 37 years old and several I knew had kids in college. By 1989, I knew gen-u-wine yuppies with grandkids. (I said nothing about hair color, noting only their gut shapes and I only indicated they typically had kids with some of them having kids in college or grandkids.) And at the time that the word yuppie was being widely disseminated, the emphasis was very definitely on “young”–the kids just out of college that followed the last Boomers.
I’m not saying the the meaning cannot have changed, but the poll was how we pictured yuppies and my memory placed them behind the Boomers, so I find claims that Boomers were yuppies amusing.
To me it’s a group of people who are overly concerned with status symbols, the latest in gossip or next big thing, and “keeping up with the Joneses”.
The group that I think of when I hear Yuppie, exhibits an arrogance and narrow-mindedness. They plan everything down to the wire and then go ballistic when things don’t go according to the perfect plan. Generally I think of them as being about mid to upper middle class, but Donald Trump comes to mind. I guess he’d be the ultimate yuppie.
You must not have gotten out much.
The opening for Weeds.
little boxes, little boxes…
Definition 1: What SmartAleq said.
Definition 2 (most frequently used on SDMB): anyone with stuff that I can’t afford.
Makes me think about American Psycho.
My problem is I know plenty of people who adhere to many or most of these examples of what constitutes yuppie behaviour but I don’t think I would call them all yuppies.
For example, everyone I know wants their kids to go to the RIGHT school, I suppose they didn’t just have kids so they could send them there though.
popped collars
Young Upwardly Mobile Professional is how it sounds in my head. People who keep up with the Joneses, take faaaaabulous vacations every year, have lots of stuff they don’t need, new car every year even though they don’t need it.
And I find they’re somewhat deck/yard obsessed, as well. That seems to be the big thing these days. I see decks these days that are better than our house!
Whenever I’m stuck in an office lobby or store and forced to listen to Smooth Jazz, I can’t help but wonder what kind of people actually like that shit. The answer always comes up yuppie.
Therefore yuppies must exist, since I never hear Dixieland or Barbershop Quartet or any other genre that I know has no real audience.
Feed me a stray cat.
A Yuppie was driving his new convertible BMW down I-25, talking on his bluetooth with his left arm hanging out the side when suddenly he was sideswiped by a passing SUV.
He pulled over and was sobbing “My Beemer, my beautiful Beemer” when a passing cop pulled up and exclaimed “Forget about your car, look at your arm!”
The yuppie looked down at his mangled left arm and cried out “My Rolex! My beautiful Rolex!”
As a semi-contrary opinion, my family fits the yuppie mold quite well from the outside and yet the motivations are quite different than are described here. We always have the best food because my wife is literally one of the foremost gourmet food experts in the U.S. It is her job and she can write offhand essays on several thousand different kinds of cheese. Her opinions are regularly found in gourmet food magazines that are marketed towards yuppies and she sells the foods to Whole Foods and Trader Joes which are havens for yuppies.
Our house was built in 1760 and we restored it ourselves over the past 7 years day in and day out. Photos of it can and may go in other types of yuppie magazines but we have the real thing. I just wanted an historical house, her family likes restoring them, and we both needed to save money. That is all there was to it.
My wife drives a BMW and I did as well until a couple of years ago before I got my SUV. We just like BMW’s and something like a Landrover which is another notorious yuppie machine wouldn’t do. I like cars and a BMW is the same to me as a 69 Camaro is to someone else. I also needed my SUV because I have two young children and need to move stuff related to the house all the time.
My wife has done European and Caribbean travel all her life and now the whole family does. We are all genuinely interested in the cultures and history of the places that we go and my wife speaks French fluently. My daughter just started kindergarten and she is in French immersion. The public schools in our town have a unique French immersion program that is offered all the way through high school. That is a yuppie thing if I ever heard it but it doesn’t cost anything extra and about 1/3 of the towns students try it and it is semi-diverse.
I am not immune to being snobby but all of those key things are genuine and well thought out. It doesn’t have anything to do with shallowness or wanting to impress other people. There is such a thing as liking nice things just because you think that they are good and advantageous to your own internal lifestyle.