Poverty

Our Western consumer culture is replete with promises of material opulence, and many people have fallen prey to its enticements. As a result of this perspective, most of the models that guide researchers' understanding of the marketplace concentrate on how to navigate this abundance to make satisfying exchange decisions. A primary driver involves coping mechanisms consumers employ to help process the endless parade of media messages designed to influence them. The term information overload was coined to describe this dilemma, masking the underlying tenet of opportunity overload. Thus, the consumer challenge is to make good decisions under the implicit assumption that our ability to conduct such transactions is ensured.

Some authors view this unspoken premise of widespread marketplace exchange capability to match unlimited opportunity as misguided. From early ethnographic research to consumer investigations of poor African Americans to the modeling of consumption vulnerability, interested parties have received fair warning of the differences in consumer behavior both within and between societies. For example, the United Nations finds that the wealthiest 20 percent of the world's population has an income fifty times greater than the bottom 20 percent, with the poorest 40 percent living on less than US$2 per day.

The disparate scholarship on restricted consumer behavior has a history that reaches back to early social science researchers with an interest in the way poverty manifests across cultures. These pioneers believed that Western media project an image of consumption that fails to recognize the widespread poverty that exists even among advanced economies, such as in the United States. In this same vein, others found that about 12 percent of the U.S. population lives below the poverty line, with an overrepresentation by people of color, single mothers, rural dwellers, and the elderly. Recent investigations show that about 25 percent of the entire nation is unable to engage adequately the material culture, with almost half of the world's inhabitants considered truly poor.

This entry explores the ways in which impoverished American citizens experience the larger material world to understand the consumer culture of poverty. The data that inform this perspective involve five different subgroups including homeless adults, homeless women and children, impoverished juvenile delinquents, welfare mothers, and rural dwellers in former coal mining towns. The qualitative investigations conducted are part of a stream of research by Ronald Paul Hill. Composites of these five sub-populations encapsulating the lives of particular individuals summarize findings. Some interpretation is provided next, containing a description of restricted consumption experiences via a series of seven interrelated thematic categories.