Costco: The New Middle Class
Eugene Healey, who writes as @eugbrandstrat, made a case recently that I haven't been able to put down. He calls it the death of the middle. As the economy stratifies and rewards the top ten percent, then the top five, the middle stops being a place you can stand. Mid-market brands, middle-of-the-road ideas, middle-of-the-road positioning. All of it thins out until you're either speaking to luxury beliefs or speaking to the mass. The line that stuck with me: there's no such thing as not in the budget, there's only not in the budget for you.
He's right. I want to add the part nobody says out loud, which is what you do about it on Monday morning when you still have to sell something.
Because the death of the middle reads like an instruction to pick a side. Go up or go wide. There's a third position and Costco has been sitting in it for years while everyone else wrote decks about it.
Costco sells a twelve hundred dollar mattress about forty feet from a four dollar rotisserie chicken and nobody walking that aisle finds it strange. That should be impossible. Those are two different customers in every segmentation model I've ever been handed. They're not two customers at Costco, because the store isn't sorted by what you can afford. It's sorted by whether you believe them.
That's the thing worth stealing. Costco didn't pick a tier. It built a trust position, and trust is the only asset that lets one brand hold both ends of a stratified market without tearing itself in half.
Kirkland is the proof. It outsells national brands sitting in the same aisle, at a lower price, in worse packaging. That is not volume. Volume gets you distribution, it does not get you chosen. What Kirkland has is permission, and permission is exactly what the middle class went looking for when the middle disappeared. Not cheap. Not premium. Just somebody they didn't have to research at ten at night on their phone.
So if you're mid-market and Eugene's piece read like a death notice, here's my version. Nobody is asking you to become luxury or become mass. They're asking you to become legible. The brands that die in a stratified market are the ones nobody can describe. The ones that live are the ones a customer can explain to a friend in one sentence without mentioning the price.
Same problem from both ends. He's telling you the middle of the market is gone. I'm telling you the middle of your positioning was killing you the whole time, and the market just stopped covering for you.
