Citing a 5 March Wall Street Journal article, blogger Tom Barnett makes the case that Wal-Mart best serves the bottom of the economic pyramid and that it only fails when it tries to drag itself higher. It’s easier to sell to the desperate than those able to make real choices.

Barnett writes:

Wal-Mart keeps screwing up in affluent markets, like Germany, Japan, large U.S. cities, but routinely cleans up in developing or emerging markets, where it’s sell to the bottom of the pyramid mentality meets an aggressive desire on the part of consumers for better economic connectivity (“My modest income is now connected to so many more choices!”).

It connects and empowers while, yes, simultaneously reconfiguring local markets–the essence of globalization.

And when you live day-to-day, paycheck-to-paycheck, cheap plastic crap can seem to be pretty good.

Jeff Hess: Have Coffee Will Write.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 0604 by Jeff Hess and is filed under Economics, International, Mexico. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.