Have you noticed the higher status of actors/citizens in all advertising, lately? Even the prostate cancer ads feature people who seem too well-off to be sick*. Car ads are for cars so expensive I can’t even afford the sales brochures. Medicare ads…why are those seniors always smiling, laughing, and well-dressed even in the pool? Is my economic inferiority complex simply an age thing? All my grand-kids have started jobs with salaries seldom seen in my entire working lifetime. Am I getting poorer or simply financially older? (Imagine a sad, sad face.)

It’s been mentioned, before, that income inequality is starting to skew financial-life planning for “normal people”. Here’s a (paraphrased) idea of what is happening:

Costco’s controversial new policy says something worrying about the economy

FAST COMPANY 11-4-2025  Jessica Stillman

New perks for some Costco members have received a decidedly mixed reaction from customers, employees, and analysts.” 

“It’s a decision that more and more leaders seem to be weighing. As management consultant Daniel Currell noted in a fascinating essay in The New York Times on the rise of pricey upgrades at Disney theme parks, companies are increasingly looking for ways to cater to–and extract more profit from—their most upmarket customers.” 

“Extract”? What a great word for what is happening. David Stockman and Ronald Reagans’ (and others) original “Trickle-Down” economic theory, where the benefits accrued by the rich will trickle down to the rest of us, appears to be working in the opposite direction, these days. The middle class of America has shrunk so much businesses are faced with the choice of marketing to the lower-class poor, or marketing to the upper-class rich. If you were running a business, which class would you want for customers? It is the logical result of a free-market capitalist society. Its effects, however, are anything but free. Those effects are easy to see in real estate where rich buyers purchase entire neighborhoods and gentrify it until no one but rich people can live there.

Now it’s seeping into all areas of life. If Costco can sell hamburger meat for $10 a pound because rich people will pay that much, what are poor hamburger buyers to do **? An upper-class customer base does not shop the same way a frugal middle-class or desperate lower-class shop. The upper-class rich don’t waste time with sales and coupons, often making purchases just to buy something, no matter the cost.

In the old days the free market focused on the savvy-shopping middle and lower classes simply because those people were the majority of purchasers. A simple chart would reveal why larger discretionary spending will beat lower, necessary spending anytime there is “competition” for markets.

Trickle Down is finally lifting all our boats, just not the way it was intended. The next few years will be interesting as there is no enforced government regulations or rules to limit the amassing of personal wealth.  Hopefully, all the new billionaires will let us have some crumbs. Forbes says “288 new billionaires entered the list in 2025.”  That gives America a total of over 900 billionaires. Ai says America had 13 billionaires in 1980. Imagine all that money…

*Don’t they get the best healthcare, with screenings and tests, whether they need them or not?

**Google “Model Pricing Strategy”.