Christmas Is Coming, Who Is Getting Fat?

The US media obsession with how a lower unemployment rate should increase holiday buying is undercut by a rarely discussed reality: while the unemployment rate is falling, so are wages and family income for many earners in the US. This means that there are an increased number of holiday shoppers who actually have less to spend – adjusted for inflation - during the pre-Christmas consumer frenzy than in past years.

A December 8 article in The Guardian describes this trend as an increase in "survivalist" consumers as compared to "selectionists":

Survivalists earn less than $50,000 a year and have to make sure they can afford every purchase. 

Selectionists are more affluent. They may still be “careful”, in PwC’s parlance, but they have more disposable income and don’t insist on waiting for the deepest discounts to kick in before buying.

In each of the last three years, however, the survivalists have become an increasingly important part of the mix, rising from 63% of PwC’s annual holiday shopping poll in 2012 to 65% in 2013 and to 67% this year. 

This confirms other indicators of a widening income gap that is leading to a race to the bottom in retailing in a society built on consumer spending. It also reflects an increasing cannibalization of the retail marketplace, in which workers who are being pushed into lower wage level jobs can only afford to buy from big box stores that pay among the lowest wages. It's the Catch-22 of a dystopian economy for the growing number of “survivalists.”
As The Guardian reports,

Because even if jobs are being created, wages are stagnant; indeed, median family income has been in decline for the last 14 years

The low unemployment rate (now at 5.8%) masks a lot of de facto underemployment: people working two or three part-time jobs but who need or want a full-time job and simply haven’t been able to find one, as well as people who simply have stopped looking for work. 

This is the spiraling down of consumerism to cutthroat wages. This economic barbarism belies a holiday season that is enshrined in the myth of "good cheer for all."

Given that the top 1 percent of the US population has received 95 percent of the economic benefits since the 2008 near-financial collapse of the nation, it is clear that the retail market is steadily being segmented into high-end luxury item stores for those who are wealthier than ever and low-end "survivalist" big box outlets for those who are steadily losing buying power.

from here