Wal-Mart knows its customers, and it knows how badly they need the discounts. Like Wal-Mart's workers, its customers are overwhelmingly female and struggling to make ends meet,... Wal-Mart takes out ads in her local paper the same day the community's poorest citizens collect their welfare checks.
"They are promoting themselves to low-income people," she says. "That's who they lure. They don't lure the rich. ... They understand the economy of America. They know the haves and have-nots. They don't put Wal-Mart in Piedmonts. They don't put Wal-Mart in those high-end parts of the community. They plant themselves right in the middle of Poorville."
A 2000 study by Andrew Franklin, then an economist at the University of Connecticut, showed that Wal-Mart operated primarily in poor and working-class communities, ,....- the Bloomingdale's set is not the discounter's primary market and probably never will be.
A 2003 study found that 23 percent of Wal-Mart Supercenter customers live on incomes of less than $25,000 a year. More than 20 percent of Wal-Mart shoppers have no bank account, (long considered a sign of dire poverty). And while almost half of Wal-Mart Supercenter customers are blue-collar workers and their families, 20 percent are unemployed or elderly.