ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the patterns of expenditure and ownership of goods amongst British retirees and explores the relationships between ageing, cohort, and consumption within this context. The demographic trends raise a host of interesting questions about the nature of modes of consumption. The demographic changes have not occurred in a vacuum but have taken place alongside a series of transformations in society. These changes have been conceptualized variously as the shift from "organized" to "disorganized" capitalism, from Fordism to post-Fordism, or from a high or first modernity to a late or second modernity. R. N. Stearns argues that consumer society developed from an modern phase spanning the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a second stage of consumer growth in the late and early nineteenth centuries, and a third phase of mass consumerism reaching maturation in the twentieth century. Historical studies of consumption have shown that consumer and material culture predate industrialization.
