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 executive editor, publisher and website architect of OpEdNews.com, Host of the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show (WNJC 1360 AM), and publisher of Storycon.org, President of Futurehealth, Inc, and an inventor . He is also published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com
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