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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about Dollar General but the demographics of Walmart shoppers is not especially low-end. If my own experience is any indication, there's one that's convenient to me, they have good prices, and they're a one-stop shop for a lot of things. I don't particularly like shopping there but it's a convenient place to pick up staples.

According to Kantar Retail’s ShopperScape, the average Walmart customer is a 51-year-old female with an annual household income of $56,482. Interestingly, that number exceeds the U.S. median household income by $4,500, as measured by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2013, which goes against the perception of Walmart as a low-end discount chain. Eighteen percent of Walmart shoppers earn more than $100,000 per household annually. And Walmart shoppers as a whole, actually earn more than Kmart shoppers.

https://www.ama.org/publications/eNewsletters/Marketing-News...

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probably says more about our collective perception that anything near the median, even above it, is low-end.

That perception becomes even more laughable when you realize that the 51 year old female in question is in the top .3% of income globally, while the "permanent underclass" are in the .4% - .8%.

global averages are also meaningless. No one cares if you're doing better than subsistence farmers in west africa if you're having trouble paying rent on your shitty apartment and living paycheck to paycheck in the wealthiest country in the world

You know in movies where the villain rich kid goes to a nice upper middle class home and calls the place a dump? That's what the global poor (as in virtually everyone on the planet) see when western "poor people" complain. It's really tone deaf and quite frankly it only takes a few minutes thought to realize all the talk of "fairness" and "equality" is window dressing and all they are purposing is the .1%'s wealth being redistributed to the .2% - .8%, ignoring the 99.2% of human beings who are actually poor and suffer on a scale that no westerner will ever experience.

If 99% of the world would swap places with you economically speaking how on earth do you get to call yourself poor?

Ignoring your completely made up percentiles and the fact that you're a right-wing troll, poor people in the US get to call themselves poor because they face real problems where the not-poor don't. Access to healthy food, healthcare, housing, quality education, etc. are all diminished for low-income people.

"Ignoring your completely made up percentiles"

You are right, I didn't know the median income moved so much last year.

US Median income = 59,039[0] = the top .2% globally[3]

Average US Worker Pay = 44,148[2] = the top .43% globally[3]

[0]http://www.businessinsider.com/us-census-median-income-2017-...

[2]https://www.thebalance.com/average-salary-information-for-us...

[3]http://www.globalrichlist.com/

"Access to healthy food, healthcare, housing, quality education, etc. are all diminished for low-income people."

And non existent for most of the planet.

EDIT: In regards to the numbers not adding up, You do understand that children don't work right? Remove children (the largest generation ever is currently in high school), then the roughly 40% or so of adults that are unemployed, retired or otherwise out of the workforce and it makes more sense. If you aren't convinced take a look at salaries in European nations, if you happen to find some reasonably high ones on average take a look at the population numbers of those nations.

I'm not going to engage with you beyond this but that doesn't even make sense given that the US makes up ~4-5% of the world population.

Why am I expected to be more concerned with fixing the problems of someone ten thousand miles away instead of the guy I see on the street near where I live? Are we both lucky? Sure. Should we feel bad for that?

I also wonder how a world with 7,600 million people can have a country of 323 million people that's all in the top 1% of people worldwide.

this is the adult version of "there's starving kids in africa, so finish your food". It does absolutely nothing but try to delegitimize the real struggles that the poor face in America.

I disagree with your numbers. I don't think impoverished Americans fall in the top 1% globally in terms of wealth.

These numbers aren't even close to accurate. The actual position of the US underclass (bottom quintile) is more like the 60-85th percentile of global income. After adjusting for CPI it's clear that poverty in the United States is very real.

https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/09/29/world-income-distributi...

The US underclass also suffer the social and psychological effects of being the underclass, i.e. weaker social support networks and exclusion from the millieu of political priorities.

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