| RPT-Poor struggling, rich spending as Christmas nears and Consumer spending for the holidays |
| News - Financial News |
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NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Adriana Garcia won't be buying her family Christmas gifts this year. The 26-year-old from Huntington Park, California lost her job as a teacher's assistant last year and now works part-time at a Jamba Juice near Los Angeles. Her husband, a security guard unable to work since hurting his hand three months ago, is not yet getting his disability checks. The couple spends on the basics: food and rent. Kelly Lenehan, a 40-year-old ultrasound technician and former paparazzo from Los Angeles, lost her job in her new field in early November, and is also planning a low key holiday. A record turnout two weeks ago on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when tens of millions of Americans, lured by bargains, hit stores to kick their holiday shopping into high gear, belied how much many Americans still struggle. Stores such as Kohl's Corp and Gap Inc's Old Navy and J.C. [Read the full article] It should come as no surprise that rich people like living around other rich people. From Shibuya in Tokyo and the Seventh Arrondissement in Paris to Manhattan’s Upper East Side and the tree-lined avenues of Palm Beach, Fla., wealth gravitates to wealth. As the global income gap between rich and poor widens, the richest neighborhoods keep getting richer—and bigger.Take, for example, Palo Alto, Calif. Over the last decade, hundreds of wealthy people have relocated to this university town as local Silicon Valley tech businesses boomed. It is home to such companies as Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, and VMWare. Thanks to so much new money, Palo Alto‘s 94304 zip code is one of the fastest-growing pockets of wealth in the U.S. The number of households in this area, where the average household net worth is $1.3 million, more than doubled since 2000, according to data from Little Rock (Ark.)-based Gadberry Group.While many zip codes in the U.S. [Read the full article] NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Adriana Garcia won't be buying her family Christmas gifts this year. The 26-year-old from Huntington Park, California lost her job as a teacher's assistant last year and now works part-time at a Jamba Juice near Los Angeles. Her husband, a security guard unable to work since hurting his hand three months ago, is not yet getting his disability checks. The couple spends on the basics: food and rent. Kelly Lenehan, a 40-year-old ultrasound technician and former paparazzo from Los Angeles, lost her job in her new field in early November, and is also planning a low key holiday. A record turnout two weeks ago on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when tens of millions of Americans, lured by bargains, hit stores to kick their holiday shopping into high gear, belied how much many Americans still struggle. Stores such as Kohl's Corp and Gap Inc's Old Navy and J.C. [Read the full article] 
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