Walmart Is Gaining Market Share Among Affluent Shoppers

Walmart Is Gaining Market Share Among Affluent Shoppers

Walmart Is Gaining Market Share Among Affluent Shoppers

Walmart has secured its position as America’s “price discount juggernaut” retailer as the Biden-Harris inflation storm sparked a scramble by big box retailers, supermarket retail chains, and discount chains into a value war to retain consumer market share. 

As previously noted, Walmart has emerged as the clear winner in the “trade-down phenomenon” that continues today as more affluent shoppers gravitate to the retail giant, and a new Goldman report shows this trend is only gaining pace. 

Goldman’s Kate McShane, Mark Jordan, and others used retail data from HundredX, including a household income breakdown and Net Purchase Intent trends, to show that Walmart has continued to gain market share of upper-income households, while other retailers, including Costco and Target, have marginally increased their share of lower-income households relative to the industry over the last year. 

“In our view, the share shift among income cohorts is likely due in part to upper-income consumers seeking out convenience, everyday value, and a comprehensive assortment through Walmart, which over-indexes to lower-income consumers relative to COST and TGT,” McShane told clients. 

The analysts add more color on the shifting consumer trends:

However, over the course of the last year, certain companies have increased their customer share of lower-income households relative to the industry average. In Jan ’24, TGT’s share was -5.4% lower than the industry, but it is now -3.0% lower in Jan ’25. Similarly, COST’s share in Jan ’24 was -7.7% lower than the industry, but it is now only -4.9% lower. In comparison, Walmart’s share of lower-income consumers relative to the industry has been decreasing: in Jan ’24, the company’s share was +9.0% higher than the industry but is now only +5.5% higher. More of Walmart’s customer base has been shifting towards upper-income households, where share was -9.0% lower than the industry in Jan ’24, but it is now only -5.5% lower. In general, trends point towards companies such as COST and TGT increasing their lower-income audience share, while Walmart is shifting towards increasing its upper-income audience share.

The analysts noted that price discounts and free delivery of goods likely led to a growing share of upper-income shoppers trading down to Walmart:

In 3Q, WMT saw higher engagement across income cohorts, with upper-income households continuing to account for the majority of share gains. In our view, this is likely due in part to WMT’s expanded convenience offerings (e.g., free delivery through Walmart+ on $35+ orders, curbside pick up), store remodels, more comprehensive assortment through Marketplace, and a continued focus on every day value, with our pricing studies showing that Walmart US grocery prices remain ~11% below peers, on average.

Here’s the income breakdown of shoppers at each of the retail giants:

The takeaway is that the multi-year inflation storm has transformed the nation’s consumers into Walmart shoppers—yet another sign that living standards continue to erode due to horrible decision-making by elected and unelected elites in the DC swamp. This has even impacted wealthy consumers who must trade down to Walmart. The financial misery DC folks have inflicted on all consumers has unified the nation, and many are thrilled…

How To Forge The Spectator Class

How To Forge The Spectator Class

How To Forge The Spectator Class

Authored by Josh Stylman via The Brownstone Institute,

My father could disassemble and rebuild a car engine in our garage. I, like many of my generation, was steered toward the ‘civilized’ path – white collar work, climate-controlled offices, and an increasing detachment from the physical world. While I grew up loving sports, memorizing baseball stats with religious devotion, and finding genuine joy in the games, something fundamental has shifted in how men engage with athletics today.

In dimly lit rooms across the nation, millions of men gather every weekend, adorned in jerseys bearing other men’s names – not as a complement to their own achievements, but as a substitute for them. We’ve transformed from a nation of players to a nation of watchers.

Like Rome’s bread and circuses, this passive consumption serves to pacify rather than inspire. 

The games themselves aren’t the problem – they can build character, teach discipline, and provide genuine entertainment. I still love sports, finding genuine joy in the games just as I did memorizing those baseball stats as a kid. But somewhere along the way, I grew up and realized they should complement life’s achievements, not substitute for them. The danger lies in what happens when grown men never make this transition.

A growing segment of young men face an even more insidious form of spectator culture. While their fathers at least watched real athletes achieve real things, many young people now idolize social media personalities and content creators – becoming passive observers of manufactured personas who achieved fame primarily by being watched. They can recite influencer dramas and gaming achievements but don’t know the stories of Solzhenitsyn or have ever built something with their own hands. The virtual has replaced the visceral; the parasocial has replaced the personal.

History shows us a recurring cycle: hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. We find ourselves now in the latter stages of this cycle, where comfort and convenience have bred a generation of observers rather than builders. Our sophisticated entertainment serves as a digital opiate, keeping the masses content while their capacity for meaningful action atrophies.

This transformation isn’t accidental. As I explored in my ‘Engineering Reality‘ series, the systematic reframing of physical fitness as problematic represents a calculated effort to weaken societal resilience. Major media outlets like the Atlantic and MSNBC have published pieces linking physical fitness to right-wing extremism, while academic institutions increasingly frame workout culture as problematic. Even gym ownership has been characterized as a potential indicator of radicalization. The message couldn’t be clearer: individual strength – both literal and metaphorical – threatens the prescribed order.

This erosion of self-reliance extends far beyond fitness. A friend who’s spent decades as an auto mechanic recently confided that he’s grateful to be nearing retirement. “These Teslas,” he told me, “they’re not even cars anymore – they’re computers on wheels. When something goes wrong, you don’t fix it; you just replace entire modules.” What was once a craft that…

Victor Davis Hanson: Myth-Busting About Musk

Victor Davis Hanson: Myth-Busting About Musk

Victor Davis Hanson: Myth-Busting About Musk

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,

Here are some of the untruths told about Elon Musk and DOGE…

“Musk has no right to cut USAID.” 

Elon Musk and his team are not cutting any federal programs.

They are auditors. They were given legal authority under a presidential executive order creating the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Its mandate is to identify waste, abuse, fraud, and irrelevance in the federal budget at a time when the U.S. is $37 trillion in debt.

The agency will expire on July 4, 2026.

Ultimately, Musk can propose program cuts, but Trump holds the authority to approve or reject them. He may or may not act on all, some, or none of the DOGE recommendations.

“No one elected Musk.” 

Like hundreds of government officials, Musk was appointed by an elected president to run an agency that does not require Senate confirmation.

Musk is as legally legitimate as the national security advisor and his National Security Council, none of whom require Senate confirmation.

Does the left believe former national security advisor Jake Sullivan, who made decisions far more pivotal than Musk, had no authority to do so because he too was neither elected nor confirmed by the Senate?

“It is a dangerous precedent to give a private citizen billionaire like Musk so much power.”

In fact, Musk has far more legal authority than did FDR’s best friend Harry Hopkins. He moved into the White House and de facto set U.S. foreign assistance policies toward Stalin’s Russia.

Musk’s position is more akin to past captains of industry like Henry Ford, Henry Kaiser, and William Knudson appointed by FDR to run the wartime economy.

None of them were either elected or confirmed by the Senate. All of them helped to save a poorly armed US after the debacle of Pearl Harbor.

“Foreign aid is ending.”

Hardly.

Foreign aid, which in all its manifestations in various cabinets and agencies is reaching nearly $80 billion per year, is not ending.

One of its distribution centers, USAID, may be vastly curtailed or bundled into the State Department. But the important bulk grants to allies like Israel or friends like Egypt or aid in times of famine relief and natural disasters to the needy abroad will remain. And these programs will be strengthened and saved precisely because they will be trimmed of skimmers and scammers.

“It is illegal to end USAID.”

USAID was created by an executive order in 1961 by then President John F. Kennedy in response to congressional legislation codifying foreign aid and allowing the president to execute the statute at his discretion.

Nearly four decades later, in 1998, Congress passed another law reifying Kennedy’s USAID as a formal agency but still within the executive branch.

But neither law mandates that Trump bundle all or even most foreign aid in USAID. He can disperse money as he sees fit throughout the cabinets. And he can keep whatever funds or programs he chooses under the aegis of USAID should he wish.

“Trump cannot impound any USAID money legislated by Congress.”

That legal question apparently depends on whose ox is gored.

Neither Congress nor the courts have ever,…

Musk Could Pull OpenAI Bid If Altman “Preserves Charity’s Mission”

Musk Could Pull OpenAI Bid If Altman “Preserves Charity’s Mission”

At the start of the week, Elon Musk led a group of investors in a $97.4 billion bid to acquire the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. However, Musk’s attorney now says the billionaire will withdraw the offer if OpenAI halts its transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit entity. 

“If OpenAI, Inc.’s Board is prepared to preserve the charity’s mission and stipulate to take them for sale’ sign off its assets by halting its conversion, Musk will withdraw the bid,” Musk’s lawyers wrote in a court filing on Wednesday. The Wall Street Journal first reported this.

If not, “the charity must be compensated by what an arms-length buyer will pay for its assets,” the filing said, adding that Musk’s very “serious offer” was to further the charity’s mission. 

Following the unsolicited offer by Musk’s investor group, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X: “No thank you, but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”  

Musk responded by calling Altman a “Swindler.” 

Swindler
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 10, 2025
Musk and Altman have been fighting in court over the direction of OpenAI. Both founded the charitable organization in 2015, and since then, Musk has been furious about Altman’s approach to potentially converting it into a for-profit company. 

“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement provided by his lawyers earlier this week, adding, “We will make sure that happens.”

The three-page filing, submitted to a San Francisco court Wednesday, has Musk blasting Altman and OpenAI, accusing the company of “repeated self-dealing, putting profits over safety, transferring its technology and keeping it closed source, concentrating AI’s power in the hands of Microsoft.”

Musk’s bid for OpenAI is backed by xAI, his own artificial intelligence company, which could merge with OpenAI following a deal. Other investors in the potential deal include Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, Atreides Management, Vy Capital, and 8VC, a venture firm led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. And who else? Ari Emanuel is the CEO of the Hollywood company Endeavor. 

It’s not over…

And there it is 💀 pic.twitter.com/fUgFIiVm1W
— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) February 10, 2025
Altman told the press by mid-week, “Our company is not for sale, nor is the mission. We are happy to buy Twitter.”

SCAM ALTMAN: “Our company is not for sale, neither is the mission. We are happy to buy Twitter.” pic.twitter.com/dTTNb2P6kh
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) February 12, 2025
Musk and his lawyers are prepared to match or exceed any bids higher than their own.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/13/2025 – 07:20…

VDH: How To Commit Democratic Party Suicide

VDH: How To Commit Democratic Party Suicide

VDH: How To Commit Democratic Party Suicide

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,

The Democratic Party is polling about 31 percent approval, a near-historic low.

Despite enjoying a huge lead in fundraising, legacy media favoritism, and incumbency, in the 2024 election, Democrats lost the White House to Donald Trump. Ever since, they have offered nothing new, no novel agenda, no innovative policies—nothing other than screaming that they are loudly against everything and anything that the president is for.

In the past, what did they accomplish by following their prior two impeachments with attempts to de-ballot Trump? Who thought sending an FBI swat team to raid Trump’s home or waging five lawfare civil and criminal suits and issuing 91 felony indictments against him would win over the public?

Was conducting a media barrage of Hitler-Trump invectives, or lowering the bar of demonization that likely led to two assassination attempts of Trump a good way to win an election?

Apparently not, given the Democrats have now lost the presidency, the House, and the Senate. The Supreme Court is conservative. They have no power to subpoena anyone; they cannot block any nomination. Much of their old administrative state control is eroding. All the main issues—the economy, energy, border security, illegal immigration, crime, DEI/woke, and foreign policy—poll against the Democrats. The more they shouted that biological men must be able to compete as transgendered females in women’s sports, the more that 80% of the public disagreed, women were turned off, and the absurd idea was exploded by Trump.

The power of the administrative state, the legacy network news, print media, and Silicon Valley’s social media and search engines, the billions that poured into the Biden and Harris campaign all went for naught.

The efforts of moderators to warp debates, of network news to edit out unfavorable Harris or Biden comments, of leftists to cancel, deplatform, ostracize, censor, and shadow ban their enemies have failed. More likely to succeed now are numerous lawsuits against leftwing media for chronic defamation and censorship.

Given that collective meltdown, what would a sane Democratic Party do?

If they were stable, then they might renounce political suicide and perhaps return to something akin to the Clinton efforts of 1992 and 1996. Then the once self-destructive Democrats finally gave up on disastrous out-of-touch McGovernism, Carterism, an Dukakism. Instead, they began to embrace legal-only immigration, secure borders, balanced budgets, support for law enforcement, and meritocracy.

The result?

After twelve years in the wilderness (1980-1992), the Democrats regained power for the next 16 of 24 years—only in the second term of Barack Obama to go full radical Jacobin and soon lose it.

The current self-destructive obsessions with DEI/woke racialism, bi-coastal talk-down elitism, boutique transgenderism, and nonstop America Lastism all came to fruition during the Biden years. A shameless conspiracy to use an enfeebled John Biden as a prop to masque an otherwise unpalatable radical, neo-socialist agenda ensured the MAGA counterrevolution.

But instead of postmortem autopsy and introspection, since Election Day, the Democrats have doubled down on their veritable collective self-destruction.

On immigration, after wiping out the border and allowing…