Age and Aging

Until relatively recently, the older consumer has been almost invisible to the wider world. In Western countries, older people have typically been poorer than the rest of the population, and they have been much less engaged in the consumer revolutions of the twentieth century. As a consequence, they have often been ignored by marketers as well, or at least placed into categories that simply define them as old, poor, and uninterested in consuming. The social and cultural studies of consumer culture that have emerged over the last few decades have also neglected engaging with age except in two key areas: the concern over children's consumption and the dominance of studies of youth subcultural consumption. Old age, however, has been virtually absent, in terms of volume ...