Champagne taste, beer budget: The new poor’s incongruent capital and consumption

Abstract

This study examines the shopping preferences of “new poor” consumers who have incongruent capital: lower economic capital and higher noneconomic capital. The new poor exemplify consumers with ambiguous and fragmented identity; thus, they do not fit marketers’ static categorization of consumer segments. In the marketplace, these consumers must compromise between their upper-class taste and lower-class earnings. Taking a Consumer Culture Theory approach to examine consumers’ identity projects in social inequality, we conduct 20 interviews among self-defined new poor consumers in the United States and Taiwan to explore how their dynamic social class consciousness is reflected in everyday consumption. The findings suggest that new poor consumers perform “compromised ideal consumption” in which they strategically interpret and wield their remaining capital to signal social class differences, while employing adaptive and active capitalization acts to access goods that should have been beyond their price range. The findings illuminate how incongruent, devalued capital reproduces social stratification in the context of downward mobility.

The perceived cosmopolitan consumption of globally mobile, young consumers from China

“…Given that consumers’ behaviors are heavily associated with their identity and the way they make sense of their life transitions (Chen and Nelson, 2017), a qualitative approach is selected for this study. There are two reasons for this.…”

“…For instance, Chen and Nelson (2017) argued that well-educated, white-collar-professional youth suffering from downward mobility in the post-recession economy may develop money-saving strategies that cannot be easily imitated by others in the same economically-deprived position. In another study on food consumption, consumers experiencing either downward or upward mobility signal their belonging to, or distance from, certain social classes by creating discourses on “how to eat” (Beagan et al , 2015).…”

When less is more: Understanding consumers' responses to minimalist appeals

“…They also derive greater happiness from accumulating material possessions (Lee et al, 2018). In contrast, higher socioeconomic status consumers value material consumption to a lesser extent (Weinberger et al, 2017) and stress quality in fashion consumption to create status boundaries (Chen & Nelson, 2020). Taken together, the above research suggests that consumers with lower (vs. higher) socioeconomic status are likely to value consumption quantity over quality.…”