When I began my career in market research in 2003, one of my first clients was Whole Foods Market. At the time, food industry veterans mocked the chain and its ‘revolution’ in quality standards for the American home. Some even openly predicted that ‘organic’ was a fad that would blow over when the overheated economy reset.
Well, the economy did rest in 2009. But, the organic food revolution had only become more extensive in scale. And it continued to grow after the Great Recession. As a field researcher for the food industry at the time, I noticed something in the homes of Whole Foods Market heavy shoppers. They were both affluent and educated. These young families reminded me of my own, growing up in Bedford, NH, in the 1980s. It all seemed to make sense until I got deeper into U.S. Census demographics and average annual U.S. food expenditure data.
After the birth of our first child in 2007, I became fascinated with the sheer amount of money a Whole Foods Market Mom spent each month. So, I started collecting our receipts as a non-representative but directional case study. And I was shocked to discover we were spending five times the annual grocery bill of a typical family of four at the time per the current BLS data.
Five years later, my consulting team and I looked into a hypothesis triggered by some Pew Research data on the shrinking middle class. Where were these folks going on the class ladder if the middle was shrinking? Up or Down? Or both? So, we did an exhausting, inflation-adjusted analysis of the upper-middle-class folks like ourselves we kept interviewing. College graduates, and mostly post-graduate degree holders. With $100K or more in H.H. income. And we found that this group had doubled in size from 1991-2012 or roughly ten years.
Little did I know that when I did a similar analysis a decade later that I would find it had doubled again. This time, though, I raised the standard and analyzed the group as individuals, not households, with $100K in 2019, pre-pandemic personal income being the cutoff.
This time I had a chart from 1962 until 2020. And I nearly fell off my chair. I had hypothesized that the upper-middle class had probably grown primarily in the 1990s and early 2000s and that its growth would decelerate. Oh no. The increase accelerated as this group came out of the Great Recession and inhaled millions more Millennials born into middle-class families.
Why should it concern us as a nation? For one, the ‘elite’ is now so enormous that it is more than capable and highly likely to engage in internal battles for control of our major institutions. And to use the broader population as mere pawns in intra-elite power struggles. It was easier for this elite group to get along when a minuscule proportion of the population and 99% of Americans didn’t fit into it.
Now, though, the average middle-class American runs into these folks all the time in their everyday life. Domestic service providers do most of their work for this 7% of America because they invest the most in new construction and home renovation. It is the HGTV class. And it’s enormous! 7% of the U.S. population is how much? Twenty-three million adults 25 and over. That’s the same size as the Florida population in total! Or 353 large-size NFL stadiums!
The ubiquity of today’s upper-middle-class and their concentration/take-over of entire zip codes and suburban/urban regions has created enormous resentment among the struggling middle class who have not seen any lifestyle changes or even lifestyle declines. Given that the everyday glue of family, religion, and neighborhood has broken down across the country, America should be concerned that a ‘content’ 7% live oblivious to the disaffection of an alienated majority. Alienated and unhappy citizens are fodder for the worst kind of revolutions and insurrections, the ones, as in Weimar Germany, where too many think they no longer have anything to lose.