Around The Clustered World

The Clustered World: How We Live, What We Buy, and What It All Means About Who We Are
by Michael J. Weiss

Michael Weiss expands on the geodemographics of the bestselling The Clustering of America with this fascinating look at the sixty-two new lifestyle "clusters" that define who we are by what we buy. The concept of clustering has spread throughout the world, revealing a global village of people who have more in common with foreigners of the same cluster than they do with their fellow countrypeople.

Weiss unveils how businesses and bureaucrats use clustering systems to influence our opinions and choices on bowling alleys in Florida, vending machines in Japan, and social policy in Sweden. His entertaining commentary reveals how Garth Brooks became big in Ireland and why Parisian office workers no longer take two hours for lunch. Colorful maps, on-the-street interviews, and statistical research make this a must-read for business people, demographic junkies, and anyone curious about what's going on down the street and around the world.

Chapter 1

The fragmenting of America

At first glance, Berwyn, Illinois, resembles many of the close-in suburbs of Chicago, a settled middle-class community of beige brick bungalows known as a gateway for immigrants. Since Berwyn's founding a century ago, waves of Czechs, Italians, Poles, and Irish have come to work in the area's foundries and patronize the ethnic bakeries and restaurants along Cermak Street. Proud of their toehold on the American Dream, homemakers in babushkas would sweep their back alleys clean enough to eat dinners of stuffed cabbage, sausage, and spaghetti off the asphalt.

But times changed, the factories closed, and Berwyn's old-world residents aged. More recently, Central and South American immigrants have discovered Berwyn, carving up the neat bungalows into overcrowded apartments and sending their children to schools where 80 percent of the students speak Spanish. Today, Berwyn is a simmering stew of foreign-born residents who work side by side at blue-collar jobs but go their separate ways after hours. Italians congregate at the Italian-American Club for dinners and boccie tournaments. Hispanics meet at new Mexican restaurants and super mercados, and throw noisy parties on Cinco de Mayo, Mexico's independence day. Regular proposals to unify the ethnic groups and merge a Hispanic festival with the Czechs' Houby Days parade (celebrating an old-world mushroom) inevitably fail. Relative newcomer Rana Khan, a Pakistani doctor who came to Berwyn in 1994 with her husband and three children, found an insular community. "I went to a PTA meeting, and for two hours not one person said a word to me," she recalled. "With Americans, it's always 'hi and bye.'"

Few places present a greater refutation of the American "melting pot" image than contemporary Berwyn. But cultural dissonance has developed, to some degree, in communities all around the country. On the eve of the twenty-first century, America has become a splintered society, with multi-ethnic towns like Berwyn reflecting a nation more diverse than ever. In the 1990 census, Americans identified themselves as belonging to 300 races, 600 Native American tribes, 70 Hispanic groups, and 75 ethnic combinations. Since 1970, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. has nearly tripled, increasing to 26.3 million and creating school districts in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago where students speak more than 100 languages and take bilingual classes in everything from Armenian to Tagalog. The explosion of niche cable TV programming, on-line chat rooms, and targeted businesses like Urban Outfitters and Zany Brainy all point to a population with a classic case of multiple personality disorder. The mind plugged into the next set of Walkman headphones may be attuned to Christian rap, New Age drumming, or Deepak Chopra-style self-improvement.

For a nation that's always valued community, this breakup of the mass market into balkanized population segments is as momentous as the collapse of Communism. Forget the melting pot. America today would be better characterized as a salad bar. From the high-rises of Manhattan's Upper East Side to the trailer parks of South Texas, from the techno-elite professionals with their frequent-flier cards to the blue-collar laborers who frequent corner bars, America has fractured into distinctive lifestyles, each with its own borders. The horrors of urban living have sparked a migration of city dwellers to the countryside, creating a nation polarized between cosmopolitan cities and homogeneous exurban communities - not to mention pockets of latte-and-Lexus culture appearing amid cows and country music. At the same time, the rise of gated communities in America bespeaks a population trying to get away from children, gangs, the poor, immigrants, anyone unlike themselves.

Today, the country's new motto should be "E pluribus pluriba": "Out of many, many."

Evidence of the nation's accelerated fragmentation is more than anecdotal. According to the geodemographers at Claritas, American society today is composed of sixty-two distinct lifestyle types - a 55 percent increase over the forty segments that defined the U.S. populace during the 1970s and '80s. These clusters are based on composites of age, ethnicity, wealth, urbanization, housing style, and family structure. But their boundaries have undergone dramatic shifts in recent years as economic, political, and social trends stratify Americans in new ways. Immigration, women in the workforce, delayed marriage, aging baby boomers, economic swings: All these trends have combined to increase the number of distinct lifestyles. And advances in database technology that link the clusters to marketing surveys and opinion polls are permitting more accurate portraits of how these disparate population groups behave - whether they prefer tofu or tamales, Mercedes or Mazda, legalizing pot or supporting animal rights.

In today's clustered world, America has become a nation of Executive Suites (upscale suburban couples), Big Fish, Small Pond (midscale exurban families), and Rustic Elders (downscale rural retirees). If you live in a new cluster called Young Literati, present in North Brooklyn, New York, and Hermosa Beach, California, your neighbors are likely coffee bar-addicted Generation Xers into hardback books and music videos. If you've fled the city for the country lifestyle of Graft, Vermont, or Sutter Creek, California, you more than likely inhabit New Eco-topia, where your baby-boom neighbors enjoy country music, camping, and protesting to their congresspeople over the encroachment of big business. In Mid-City Mix, a cluster of working-class African American neighborhoods, residents believe O. J. Simpson was properly acquitted of murdering his former wife and her friend. In Greenbelt Families, an upscale white enclave typically located near Mid-City Mix communities, residents almost universally believe he was guilty. When you say "oil" in Rural Industria, a blue-collar heartland cluster, residents think "Quaker State." In the family suburbs of Winner's Circle, the second most affluent lifestyle, they think "extra virgin olive."

These lifestyles represent America's modern tribes, sixty-two distinct population groups each with its own set of values, culture, and means of coping with today's problems. A generation ago, Americans thought of themselves as city dwellers, suburbanites, or country folk. But we are no longer that simple, and our neighborhoods reflect our growing complexity. Clusters, which were created to identify demographically similar zip codes around the U.S., are now used to demarcate a variety of small geographic areas, including census tracts (500-1,000 households) and zip plus 4 postal codes (about ten households). Once used interchangeably with neighborhood type, however, the term cluster now refers to population segments where, thanks to technological advancements, no physical contact is required for cluster membership. The residents of Pools & Patios, a cluster of upper-middle-class suburban couples, congregate in La Crescenta, California, and Rockville, Maryland, but they also can be found on one block in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and in a few households in Portland, Maine. These residents can meet their neighbors across a fence to borrow a cup of sugar or argue issues, or they can schmooze on-line in the nonphysical world, debating the merits of a vacation in Austria or Hungary. In the clustered world, geographic communities united by PTAs, political clubs, and Sunday schools have given way to consumption communities defined by demographics, intellect, taste, and outlook. Today's town square is the on-line chat room.

The cluster system serves as a barometer in this changing world, monitoring how the country is evolving in distinct geographical areas. No longer can sociologists lump "American" behavior into a single trend line. Despite what network newscasters might have you believe, Americans are not becoming smarter or fatter or more indebted - but particular clusters most assuredly are. When Georgia's Division of Public Health cluster-coded the state's entire population, it found higher rates of breast cancer among women who lived in the factory towns classified Mines & Mills; afterward, it targeted mammography programs to those cluster communities. Nationwide, the poorly educated, small-town residents of Back Country Folks are typically more overweight than the college graduates of Urban Gold Coast, who heed the fat and cholesterol information printed on packaged foods. Surveys find that one in three Americans smoke, but many city-based Money & Brains sophisticates would be hard-pressed to name a smoker in their circle of friends and family (not counting, of course, those men and women caught up in the recent yuppie-stoked cigar-sucking craze). Smokers thrive in other lifestyle types, like Grain Belt and Scrub Pine Flats, a long geographic and demographic distance from upscale, college-educated, health-conscious surroundings. As the "American Way" becomes more elusive, the insights offered by the cluster system help us to appreciate who we are and where we're headed.

Copyright © 2000 by Michael J. Weiss

About the Author

Michael J. Weiss is an award-winning journalist, author, and marketing consultant. A contributing editor to the Washingtonian and Ladies' Home Journal, he has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, the Newport Times, Redbook, and People. His first book, The Clustering of America, was named one of the best business books of 1988. He lives with his wife and two children in Washington, D.C.