By Federico Soto Roland

For years we told ourselves we "were a middle-class country." We believed it. We repeated it on TV, in books, around the Sunday lunch table. The middle class was our symbolic comfort zone, a kind of secular national faith. But the mirror is broken, and what it reflects today is something else entirely. We're no longer that. We were, perhaps. Today, Argentina is another country.

Guillermo Oliveto spells it out in his book "Clase media. Mito, realidad o nostalgia" (2025): that Argentine middle class that used to consume, project itself and aspire is no longer here. It blurred away. What broke isn't just an income level: it's a story. People no longer call themselves middle class — now they're "grinders," "in-and-outers," "lucky workers." And in this new social landscape, everything is rearranged, consumption most of all.

Vicente and Hugo Muleiro also sensed the shift back in 2019 with their book "La clase un cuarto." In it they identified a social band that no longer fit any label: too poor to be middle class, too aspirational to call itself lower class. A gray zone where millions live on a tightrope. They consume when they can, switch brands without a second thought, and above all chase one thing: making it to the end of the month without falling.

The brands that are growing target the base of the pyramid

That shifting of tectonic plates left many people out. But not everyone. Some brands read the signal before anyone else. They didn't sit around mourning the nostalgia of the middle class. They moved into the base of the pyramid, where there's volume, need and frustrated desire. And they grew. Explosively.

Examples? Manaos, the soft drink that laughed in the face of the multinationals. In 2023 it overtook Pepsi and is now going head-to-head with Coca-Cola across the deep suburbs of Buenos Aires. At $1,500 for the 2.25L bottle when the competition costs $4,000, it's a real option. According to its founder, Manaos doesn't just grow: it regulates — "it keeps the other brands' prices from running wild." And it does so with its own bold, popular marketing. It's a brand of resistance.

Grido, the ice cream chain born in Córdoba, is today the third-largest in the world by number of stores. They don't sell luxury: they sell access. With affordable franchises, returnable tubs and popular flavors, it beat the boutique ice cream brands. Its strategy: never give up the pleasure, but without guilt over the price.

Saphirus, which started in a garage in 2010, now sells 60 million units a year. Air fresheners, fabric sprays, diffusers. It democratized the scented home. With neighborhood resellers, catchy jingles and realistic prices, it made its way into the homes that could no longer afford Glade — and gave those people a way to earn a living as resellers!

Marolio, the king of the shopping cart, grew on a simple logic: quality without snob marketing. It has 800 products, all under the same name. Rice, oil, tuna, coffee, wine. All Marolio. All affordable. And all present. Its president, Juan Fera, puts it bluntly: "We never got too clever with our prices. That's why we never had to lower them."

What do all these brands do? They speak to the new center of the market: the base. They're not after status, they're after presence. They don't want to be "aspirational": they want to be there. On the table, in the fridge, in the medicine cabinet. While others mourned the disappearance of the middle class, these brands wrote it off long ago. And they pushed forward.

Luxury brands and the reshaping of the "great middle road"

At the other end of the spectrum, luxury pulled down the shutters. Valentino, Louis Vuitton, Ralph Lauren, Cartier, Ferragamo: they all left. Avenida Alvear, once the Buenos Aires postcard of international glamour, today looks like an empty showroom of what we used to be. The import restrictions, the inflation, the luxury taxes and the nosediving demand all did their part. The wealthy Argentine no longer buys here: they travel, import, place orders. The local premium market is symbolic. A ghost of what it once was (or what we hoped it would be!).

And in the middle, the brands that targeted the middle-middle class ended up in the worst possible place: too expensive to compete with the popular ones, too mass-market to play in the ABC1 niche. The gray area of commercial tragedy. But many, far from giving up, reinvented themselves.

How did they hold on? With ideas. They shrank packaging to lower the price point without touching quality. They relaunched formats that seemed forgotten: sachets, doypacks, returnables. They rolled out "B" brands under the same umbrella: La Serenísima with Armonía, Nestlé with Rindex. They put on permanent promotions, combos, 3-for-2 deals, store cards, QR discounts. They joined the Precios Cuidados program even when it ate into their margins. But they kept going. And they keep going.

You could say they adapted. That they survived. That they got it. Because if this decade in Argentina proved anything, it's that the middle class no longer exists as a homogeneous bloc. It exists as nostalgia. As aspiration. As something that once was. Consumption today is polarized: on one side, those who buy Manaos. On the other, those who import perfumes through Ezeiza. In the middle, all that's left is quicksand.

And yet, even in that quicksand there's ingenuity. There's a fighting trench. There are brands that don't give up. That understand the story has changed, that purchasing power has fallen, that the consumer isn't an idiot but is tired. That wants the same as always, but in a different package, at a different price, with a different proposition.

Are we no longer the country we think we are?

Argentina has changed. We're no longer the country that believed that with work, study and effort you could buy a brand-new car and head to the coast for a couple of weeks. Today it's more likely that you pay the rent with the deal of the day and hunt for two-for-one shampoo. And not for lack of dignity: for lack of margin.

The brands that understood this were the ones that grew the most. The ones still waiting for "the middle-class country" to return face a hard challenge: that country, for the most part, is no longer here. Will it ever come back? No one knows. Maybe it's better to get up to date, before ending up in the graveyard of labels that speak a language few people listen to anymore.

Welcome to the new map of Argentine consumption. Brutal. Honest. And above all, real … because as we sometimes say … "it is what it is!"