Consumerism in the purchasing behavior of Polish seniors

Consumerism is understood as a consumer trend closely associated with modern outlooks on life and value systems and with the growth of individual and social prosperity which involves excessive consumption of material goods and services. These consumption patterns mainly address secondary (higher-order) needs that result from the evolution of societies. The needs keep on growing due to progressive globalization, economic development and technical progress. However, note that it is currently difficult to clearly distinguish between primary and secondary needs because some secondary needs may be felt so strongly that they become similar to basic needs. Consumerism is visible in many aspects of consumers’ everyday lives. Nowadays many people, including seniors, buy excessive amounts of material goods they do not need for living in the society on a daily basis. The reasons for these developments include increased social prosperity and wealth; diversity of market offers; shorter product lifecycles; accelerated flow of goods and ideas; pursuit of new products; widespread acceptance of diversity; and a developed system of installment loans for purchasing products and services. This paper seeks to provide some insight into consumerism in consumer behavior of people aged 65+ in Poland, based on the author’s research findings. The theoretical part of this study explains the concept, nature, causes and consequences of consumerism based on a critical review of the relevant literature. Later, this paper draws on the author’s own research and sheds light on seniors’ consumer behaviors that are clearly part of the consumer trend termed consumerism. A positive or negative attitude towards shopping is determined by age, education level and wealth of the seniors surveyed. The findings on how often the elderly buy food confirm that the seniors surveyed can be considered active consumers. Young-old seniors do shopping far more often than the oldest-old. Almost half the 65–74 age group state that they shop for food every day, compared to 2/5 of respondents in the 75–84 age group and to less than one in ten oldest-old respondents. Every third senior consumer claims to always buy more products than actually needed, while one in five does so occasionally. Almost half of the elderly said that they sometimes threw away expired or rotten food. The pursuit of new material goods by senior consumers is reinforced by increasingly sophisticated instruments of social persuasion, with advertising playing a key role as it efficiently seizes the opportunities offered by the development of new information technologies (e.g. behavioral targeting). The relatively high percentage of consumer behaviors that can be termed consumerism may be partly explained by age, health, lifestyle and rather poor environmental awareness.