Today's Wall Street Journal has a front page story on how Proctor and Gamble is adjusting its product mix and pricing to reflect a shrinking middle class. The article, As Middle Class Shrinks , P&G Aims High and Low, states, "P &G's roll out of Gain dish soap says a lot about the health of the American middle class: The world's largest maker of consumer products is now betting that the squeeze on middle America will be long lasting. "It's required us to think differently about our product portfolio and how to please the high-end and lower-end markets," says Melanie Healey, group president of P&G's North America business. "That's frankly where a lot of the growth is happening."
The conclusion I draw from this is that big corporations will not be hurt by the death or dying of the middle class. They'll change their product mix. A big new topic for multinational corporations is about targeting the "bottom of the pyramid," referring to the poorest people in the world. There's a profit to be made from them too, the argument goes.
Looks like it's under way here in the US too, as more and more Americans fall through the safety web or just fall deep-- as health issues cause bankruptcy, as life's vicissitudes disrupt the meager safety buffers we have left in place.
By the way, the article refers to " the American middle class--the 40% of households with annual incomes between $50,000 and $140,000 a year."
I'm not going to do the digging to see what current numbers look like. Maybe some of you can do it in the comments.
The point of this article is that the corporations will do just fine without an American middle class. Will YOU? Will DEMOCRACY" Will JUSTICE?
P&G Headquarters
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
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more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
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