Women Shopping Habits and Class in America April 24, 2006
According to a Financial Times article today, lower-income women (with less than $45,000 annual household income) confined their weekly shopping to the mass merchandisers, super-centers, and dollar stores while high-income shoppers (with annual household income of more than $75,000) shopped in drug stores, department stores, specialty stores and warehouse clubs.
…women shoppers were “even more prudent and price conscious and even less willing to pay a premium for convenience” than two years ago. Their attitudes to shopping are all focused on saving money.
From what I’ve seen with friends and family, it seems that every family, regardless of economic class shops at discount warehouse stores (such as Sam’s Club or Costco) and are more conscious of prices. Perhaps the growing gap between low income and high income shoppers widening is a big reason that the lower, middle, and upper middle class are increasing in number.
Speaking of classes, The Oprah Show had an episode about class in America. Jamie Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical company, shares with Oprah some interesting and depressing facts about the rich and poor gap:
- The top one percent of Americans own roughly 40 percent of the country’s wealth.
- The top one percent possesses more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.
- An average member of the top one percent earns roughly $862,000 a year while a majority of Americans earn only $34,736. That’s what the average CEO earns in less than one day of work!
Do you think this lopsided wealth, concentrated on the top 1% of Americans is related to the topic of shopping habits above?
Source:
Shopping Habits Shift as Women Watch Their Wallets
by Lauren Foster of Financial Times
- Posted in : Economy, Income Gap, Poverty
- Author : Kyle
Comments»
[…] Our family grew up in what I think is an upper class neighborhood. I had friends whose family had huge homes, nice cars (Ferrari, Porsche, Benz), and parents who owned businesses or were executives. Our family was comfortable, but we didn’t own the 6000 sq. ft. mansions, sports cars. In other words, I believed that we were upper middle class family in an upper class neighborhood. Our discussion about class in America prompted me to think about what class I am in. Although I knew that the lower class didn’t have much net worth or did not hold management-type jobs, I never thought about what made a family middle class vs upper class. […]