Thursday, March 08, 2007

Class Laundry

Last week in my marketing class, the professor was talking about market segments in Egypt. He used household laundry practices as a way to categorize the different classes of consumers in Egypt. The poor wash their clothes by hand—the same way clothes have been washed for centuries, in the sink, or in a large basin. The poor graduate from the bottom by owning a semi-automatic washing machine. This machine is little more than a big metal tub on wheels that one fills and empties by hand, the automatic part is a small agitating wheel that spins at the bottom causing the clothes to swirl around. The emerging middle class owns a front loading automatic washer. The Cairo elite own this, coupled with a dryer. How neat—all of Cairo society falls into these categories. Funny enough, this actually works here. Most of the population--the non-elites, do not own dryers. This town is nothing but one high rise after another and each building seems to bloom with the colors of laundry hung out windows and over balconies to dry. And in participation with the Cairene way, I just got done hauling a bunch of soggy clothes out of our large metal tub with wheels and hung them neatly outside to dry. Guess I know my place.

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