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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe decline and fall of the American middle class
A couple of decades ago, someone told me about an article in Forbes magazine delineating a new 'two-tier' marketing strategy: Market to upper-income and lower income groups; forget about the middle class. Naive optimist that I was, I dismissed the idea. Now, the two-tier model is being promoted by Citibank as: "The Consumer Hourglass Theory." Paul Harris describes it in an article in the Guardian UK. the article is from 2011; but, even more relevant today:
Harris' article repeats the usual grim statistics about the loss in net worth of middle income people, new workers being paid half of what older, "grandfather" employees are getting, etc.
Remember, a Citibank analyst also coined the word plutonomy, to describe the theory that a healthy economy could be maintained by catering to the luxury needs of the upper 0.01% and above.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Where the rich have rights and the rest of us have duties.
Thank you for the heads-up, LongTomH. Most important information and outstanding analysis.
redqueen
(115,108 posts)It's not unintentional, this stuff.
winter is coming
(11,785 posts)The reality is that everyone, excepting a small bubble at the top, is getting squeezed.
LongTomH
(8,636 posts)Market, mostly to the very rich; then aim some of your products at the lower classes, the people who shop at Wal-Mart or Dollar Stores. Forget about the middle class; they're disappearing.
MichiganVote
(21,086 posts)Not when it comes to wages, income, job descriptions, housing, education, taxes, services, pensions, medical care, you name it, they want a bigger cut every single year.
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)catering to the luxury needs of the aristocracy. And the unemployment that the fall of the aristocracy caused was one of the contributers to the later excesses of The Revolution.
galileoreloaded
(2,571 posts)resources are a zero sum game. American decadence from the 50's on has been at the cost of brown peoples everywhere. some boomers won, and the rest of the world suffered.
what we see now is reversion to the mean.
leftstreet
(36,119 posts)Interesting article