I'm reading an article on how census data is used for marketing, and it includes examples of the different demographic categories (PDF) marketers organize us into by neighbourhood.
I don't know if it's just me, but I find the average incomes of those demographic groups really high, especially given the qualitative descriptions assigned to them.
The lowest income group averages $40,000, but there are all kinds of people in the real life who earn way less than that, and incomes in the $50,000 range are described as "downscale" and "low income".
You can look up your own postal code by going here and clicking on "Lifestyle Lookup". When I looked up my postal code, I saw an average income higher than I will ever earn (in constant dollars) described as "middle" income. But I'm living quite comfortably here on noticeably less than that amount - I painlessly did my year of Shut Up and Buy It with a salary of twenty grand less than that amount. I ran the numbers for several other postal codes of people whose incomes I know, and there's a constant pattern of living comfortably on $20,000 less than the average for working people or half of the average for retired people, and everyone is far more comfortable than the qualitative label associated with their actual income bracket suggests. (i.e. based on how it feels in my bank account, $50,000 is more of a middle class lifestyle than low income.)
Are these categories off, or is my sense of how comfortable a given income level is off? How do people in these categories feel IRL? How do people in these categories perceive other categories?
And what of poor people, who make significantly less than the $40,052 average given for the lowest income category?
No comments:
Post a Comment