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This paper presents the content of a special issue dedicated to consumption and budget surveys. The special issue leans on three different strands of research: research on consumption, on survey practices, and on welfare states. It explores how consumers count and consume, as well as the methods and knowledge that have been developed to assess consumers’ practices, and questions related to the emergence of mass consumption. Two documents present a survey designed by a Christian workers’ association, another one comes from research carried out by a group of young French sociologists during the 1960s. This special issue highlights the richness of existing studies, while it also insists that there is a lot more work to do in the field of consumption surveys.