This article examines the consumer “cycle of poverty” using a decade of ethnographic research on the material lives of the poor. For the purposes of this article, composite portraits of six different poverty subpopulations were developed in an attempt to capture the lived experience of such individuals. These composites were written as six short stories that represent the source of ethnographic evidence used to inform five thematic categories. Implications for ethnographers, the broader consumer research community, and public policy makers are provided in the close.
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