ABSTRACT
The poor will always be with us, or so it goes in many passages in the Judeo-Christian bible. Thus, we have had the problem of poverty for millennia without any real solutions coming from several quarters, including consumer scholars. Of course, our academic discipline does not have such a lengthy history, only going back to seminal work by Alan Andreasen (1975; 1993) and a few others who were primarily interested in the consumption rights of African Americans. More recent scholarship has moved to other subpopulations of poor consumers (Talukdar 2008) along with the base of the pyramid (Viswanathan, Rosa, and Ruth 2010). Together, they reveal a solid but very inconsistent pattern of research that involves a relatively few academic adherents. While it is possible to bring this work together, the goal here is to chronicle previous work with men, women, and children that I have worked with and studied over time. The chapter proceeds from theme to theme, showing what I have learned and, ultimately, what remains to be done. Each theme has a particular set of projects as a guide so that lessons can be made tangible for researchers and other readers.
