Large Companies Love LGBT and Here is Why
Annual study comes as companies target growing demographic
About 7% of U.S. adults identify as gay, bisexual, transgender. We are up from 3% the Republicans were insisting back during the Reagan administration. That was down from 10% which then went down to 5%. Was this an organized, systemic way to bring down or erase as many LGBT people as possible? The LGBT community has always felt a sense that the government and the church wanted to erase the numbers if not erase them totally.. A community without numbers is a community without power. Even if the numbers are not visible it basically has the same effect.
The numbers have always been based on fictitious science. If you have a bad base of samples you will get a bad set of numbers. When measuring the amount of gay people there are, you have to take into account the possible amount of numbers you might be missing (closeted). You are not just going to add them to the base numbers but they will guide you if you get a very low number you know the example of people you are using are not being honest with you. After getting marriage equality in the United States you had enough gay people feeling good enough about themselves to say “yes” I am gay, bisexual, lesbian, etc. Meaning the numbers there should be mostly accurate depending on the questions asked to obtain those numbers.
Professional sales people know how to get a yes from a reluctant customer and is the way you ask the questions. For instance: “Do you need a bracelet?” Answer: ? but instead, “Wouldn’t that bracelet look gorgeous on that hand of yours?” Which one do you think is going to get the yes?
It all depends on how you ask a question. So the first rule is to get an unbiased team to do the survey. I keep pointing out about how one get answers on a questionnaire because I feel 7% is too low.
Not for the people that are in the closet but the people that do gay stuff like getting married, buying wedding bands. Coming out is not something you do once but many times. You have gay people after coming out, not coming fourth when they should have said they were gay.
It could be a public or private family gathering or coworkers. For that reason I believe that 7% is way too low. I think a 10% is fairer and there is some evidence of it, including the gay people out in the armed forces.
Still 7% is high enough to currently cause a revolution on the business community that cater direct to the customer. You always had the savvy small business man. Companies like Exxon remained ‘anti gay” following the feeling to the Chairman of the board. But now You have companies like PayPal threatening to cut their work force in Indiana in [which they are a major employer] when the bathroom, religious anti gay law was passed. This was a law that would allow anyone to refuse service on religious grounds to anyone they suspected of being LGBT including Doctors and Paramedics! When you let the religious people dictate terms to what they see as social problems they don’t fuzz around, they go for death, so it is seldom about a cake or just a law.
There are always extra and hidden implications to discrimination laws. Coming back to Pay Pal, they never threatened to cut service in countries like Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan where they hang and incarcerate members of the LGBT community for being just that.
Even during the Republican convention in Ohio they (PayPal) were invited and they accepted to be a speaker there. A Convention put out by a homophobic GOP party with a platform against Gays that goes back to the Reagan years. The most fowled mouth and full of hatred language filled towards a popular President and Democratic Contender that while I write have 5% plurality against the Convention’s GOP Nominee Donald Trump [40-45%]. So far he isn’t getting any bump in the numbers and I don’t wonder why. What is Pay Pal doing there?? Back to the numbers….
Bloomberg posted the following report on business generated by the LGBT percentage yesterday Wednesday July 20:
The combined buying power of U.S. lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender adults rose about 3.7 percent to $917 billion last year, rivaling the disposable income of other American minority groups, according to an annual analysis.
The forecast, based on an estimate that as many as 7 percent of adults identify as LGBT, reflects the growing acceptance by society as more people are willing to self-identify, said Bob Witeck, who for the past decade has been conducting the annual study through his Washington-based communications firm.
“The footprint that gay people have today in the economy is much, much more present, much more visible,” Witeck said in an interview. “Also, companies are responding not just to LGBT purchasing power, they are responding to others who are aligned and sympathetic.”
Gay political and economic power is coming into sharper focus as advocates battle for full equal rights at the federal level. At the same time, hundreds of laws were introduced in state legislatures this year that are seen as eroding rights for LGBT people. In support of their gay employees, Dow Chemical Co., Salesforce.com, Walt Disney Co. and other companies publicly pressured states to abandon discriminatory laws.
In comparison, purchasing power for black Americans was estimated at $1.2 trillion last year, with Hispanic buying clout at $1.3 trillion and Asian disposable income at $825 billion, according to the University of Georgia’s Selig Center for Economic Growth. The same methodology is used to estimate LGBT buying power, Witeck said. Total U.S. disposable income last year was $13.5 trillion, according to the Selig Center.
The LGBT estimates are for adults only, while estimates for blacks and Hispanics include children without income, which reduces the average disposable income available for those bigger demographic groups. Gay Americans are included among those minority groups as well, Witeck said.
The trend is likely to continue. With legal gay marriage now a year old in the U.S., the purchasing power of LGBT people is starting to look more and more like the purchasing patterns of other groups, Witeck said.
“It reminds companies how visible the population is today,” he said. “In a year’s time, marriage has changed things forever, and that genie is not going back in the bottle again. Families are now quite evident. They are coming forward to buy things for their households. They’re shopping for cars. They’re buying for the kids they are having.”
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