Introduction

As we have seen in Chapters One and Two, the closing decades of the 20th century saw significant social changes in the nature of later life, some of which reflect the emergence of ‘consumer societies’ in the UK and elsewhere. The uneven nature of retirement, as well as the relative affluence of many retired people and the poverty of others, influence the experience and patterns of consumption in later life. Several key writers have pointed out how social identities are increasingly formed around processes of consumption rather than those of production and reproduction (Beck, 1991; Bauman, 1998; Zukin and Maguire, 2004). While research on the link between consumption and identity has been carried out on young or working-age groups (Hebdidge, 1979; Nixon, 1996), gerontological researchers have often presumed that older people are outside the cultural dynamics of consumption or implicitly assumed that such dynamics play little part in the day-to-day lives of older people (Gilleard, 1996; Gilleard and Higgs, 2000). However, as several commentators are aware (Dychtwald, 1999; Freedman, 1999; Metz and Underwood, 2005), the cohorts of people retiring today are those who pioneered the creation of the post-war consumer culture. The decades of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of new, youth-orientated consumer markets directed at cohort located sub-cultures. While the absolute numbers of people making up the ‘baby-boomer’ or ‘baby-bulge’ cohorts was certainly important, this was not the main reason for their significance. Young people during this period had money and they also had an increasing range of non-essential items to spend it on (Bocock, 1993). These new consumer opportunities went further than just providing outlets for fashion and conspicuous expenditure; they provided the basis for generational identities that continue to be played out decades later. The post-war cohorts both lived through the emergence of the ‘affluent society’ and participated in creating contemporary consumer society. The emphasis on choice in what they wore, as well as in the entertainment they consumed, and the goods they owned, provided the stimulus for a mass consumer culture that was different from what had gone before (Kammen, 1999).