Payoff in the Golden Years : Americans as Young as 50 Can Cash In on Array of Senior Discounts

This is surely, you say, the consumer age of MTV and “thirtysomething”; the time of hellbent youth and prime-time yuppiedom.

But listen up: We’re also living in the age of a less flamboyant but nonetheless hot item among many of America’s goods-and-services promoters--the senior citizen discount.

You may not realize it, especially if you’re still under 60 or so. Especially when so much attention is given to generations no older than middle-aged baby boomers. Especially when even the thought of discussing price cuts for really old Americans seems downright depressing.

Yet the past decade also saw the senior discount movement take hold of the American marketplace, one more spinoff from a mighty demographic upheaval--the unprecedented growth of the 60-and-over population, now nearly 17% of the nation’s total.

The senior discount phenomenon has generated its own bustling network from New York and Florida to Orange and Los Angeles counties. It has won over national-chain retailers and hotels as well as the neighborhood drug stores, beauticians and plumbers, with discounts starting at 10% and ranging up to 25% and 30%, some higher.

And it has done as much as any trend to project the new image--a senior citizen chic, if you will--of a growing segment of older Americans as a free-spending and diversified consumer market.

“For decades, their image as customers was fixed and isolated from the rest of the market--you know, dentures and orthopedic shoes, the Geritol set. Now the image has swung the other way. Now it’s big RVs and cruises, the real leisure class in America today,” said sociologist Rosalie Gilford, an associate academic director at Cal State Fullerton’s Ruby Gerontology Center.

Indeed, to anyone unfamiliar with the senior discounts being offered in advertisements, directories and other senior citizen publications, the range of price cuts strictly for older Americans can be eye-opening:

If you’re 65, you can receive a 10% discount on parts from A-Ames Plumbing and Heating.

At 62, the National Park Service will grant you a free lifetime pass to any of the national parks, historical sites, monuments and national forests. Great Western Bank will give you free checking.

At 60, you can receive a 20% discount from Exceptional Termite Control in Los Angeles county.

When you hit 55, Ross Stores will give you 10% off on Tuesdays.

And you can join Sears’ Mature Outlook, which gives you discount coupons and membership in a senior services club, if you are at least 50.

Fifty???!!!

If that shocks you, then you have to be reminded that the magic number for entry into the “golden years” circle--as far as most researchers and senior activists are concerned--is no longer set automatically at 65.

For years now, the minimum age in many programs for older Americans has been creeping downward--first 60, then 55, now even 50--in recognition of the age, researchers say, when a person’s physical being generally begins its most significant decline.

So, while 65 continues to be the eligible age for many discounts--including Amtrak’s and CVS Pharmacies’--it’s just as common to find those at age 55 or 50.

The clincher is that at 50, you can become a card-carrying member of the American Assn. of Retired Persons (AARP), the powerful Washington-based political and economic advocacy organization, whose services include a travel-oriented discount directory, including airlines, hotels and vehicle rentals, for its 32 million members.

But the demographics are changing even more dramatically at the other end of the older American scale. Because we are living far longer--life expectancy is now close to 72 for men and 79 for women--and enjoying better health over a longer period, increasingly more senior citizens are enjoying active lives into their 70s and 80s.

Thus, marketing specialists argue, it is absurd for business firms to keep stereotyping older Americans in monolithic terms.

“You can’t lump a 75-year-old, who grew up and worked in an entirely different world, with people in their late 50s. There is too great a variance in values, lifestyles and spending habits,” explained consultant Frank Conaway, president of Primelife, an Orange-based consulting firm for the “mature American” market.

The bottom line of all this for business firms, Conaway and other specialists point out, is that today’s mature Americans compose an unusually lucrative consumer market ripe for the picking.

While most retirees live on a fixed income with little if any extra spending money, specialists say that a significantly large number of older people now enjoy an enviable fiscal and leisure status. Because of this, specialists add, 50-and-older Americans as a whole have the most discretionary or free-spending income--estimated at $170 billion a year--of any population category.

“We’re talking about people whose homes are paid off or nearly so, whose kids have left, whose investments give them a financial cushion. They are now ready and willing--and able--to go out and spend money on themselves,” said Jon Torp, lecturer in marketing at USC’s Andrus Gerontology Center. And, specialists note, one of the ways to woo the older American consumer--be it for the everyday necessities or the extra amenities--is a tried-and-true business come-on: the price markdown.

At first, the senior discount seemed more a novelty.

“Certainly, some discounts have been around for years, such as the movie theaters and amusement parks. But the concept on an organized basis did not really take place until the late 1960s and early 1970s,” said marketing professor George Moschis, director of the Center for Mature Consumer Studies at Georgia State University.

“Public agencies led the way because that was the Great Society era and the focus was to serve the lower-income senior citizens. For businesses in those programs, it was a matter of both social responsibility and a good P.R. image,” Moschis added.

The best-known early example was the discount program launched in 1971 in New York City for consumers 65 and older. The city-backed effort provided window logos for the hundreds of member firms, which offered just about everything from pharmaceuticals to pizza.

But, researchers say, it wasn’t until the 1980s, when the senior citizen population was really soaring--and when the older Americans’ activeness and money power became more apparent--that the senior discount field really took off.

Advertisements for discounts and other special offers for tourism became as common as ones for retirement residences, health care and fiscal matters in senior citizen newspapers and other publications.

And as more discount directories came out--usually highly localized lists issued by senior community centers--attempts were made in the 1980s to coordinate them as part of larger networks.

One effort is California’s Golden State Senior Discount Program, which was launched in 1981 and at its peak had 325 participating communities, including many in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, San Bernardino and Riverside counties. Not all the local centers print their own business lists, but all participating consumers--who have to be at least 60--and firms are issued membership identifications.

On a far grander scale was Southwestern Bell Media Inc.’s Silver Pages directories that served 90 areas in 29 states, including Southern California. Initiated with much fanfare in 1985, the St. Louis-based telephone affiliate produced handsomely packaged books with Bob Hope on the cover and with listings localized for each region. A consumer, who had to be at least 60, was provided a free “Silver Savers’ Passport” card.

And the Silver Pages offered the typical range of discounts, generally from 10% to 25%, with some adjusted to certain times of day or week. The types of merchants and services were also typical, such as auto mechanics, banks, clothing shops, beauty salons, golf courses, hotels and inns, kennels, performing arts facilities, physicians and dentists, television repairs, restaurants and travel agencies.

However, most market observers argue that altruistic motives play little if any role for most participating firms.

“OK, maybe some do feel a sense of public good for the older population. But overall, let’s face it, we’re talking bottom line here. Businesses suddenly realize that there’s this great new market out there and there’s money to be made--it’s as simple as that,” said marketing professor Harold Kassarjian of UCLA.

A case in point, senior advocates contend, was the cancellation in 1988 of Southwestern Bell Media’s nationwide Silver Pages.

“The (Silver Pages) project was supposed to replace most of the little local directories with one super-directory,” said information services supervisor Nancy Schneider of the Orange County Area Agency on Aging. “But the trouble was that they packed up and left before they could establish any real rapport with the local people.”

Bill Yaney, executive assistant with the Los Angeles County Area Agency on Aging, put it this way: “When (Southwestern) pulled out, they told us the project just wasn’t cost-effective. They said it wasn’t generating enough revenue for them.”

Nevertheless, senior advocates maintain the discount field overall has attracted significantly large numbers of consumers and businesses.

California state agencies, which provided technical assistance to local centers for the Golden State Senior Discount Program’s first eight years, reported issuing as many as 200,000 membership cards.

AARP, the national advocacy organization for older Americans, said one-third of its membership of 32 million has used its travel-oriented discount program in the past year.

And marketing consultants in the field like to quote this finding of one major survey of consumers age 55 to 79: Only 10% of them reported “never” using senior discounts.

The “never” or the reluctant-user categories raises the question of age stigma that has always underscored the whole senior discount phenomenon.

“If you are 75 or older, you don’t seem to mind being called a senior citizen,” said marketing consultant Conaway. “But if you are 60 or 55 or 50, you may feel deeply offended. You think of yourself as still in your prime, still fit and active--and not old . Not until you hit 65 at least. Not until you get that Medicare.”

But that doesn’t mean consumers under 65 never take senior discounts.

“I know people (under 65) who hate to stand in the movie line and ask for the senior ticket, or tell the waitress they want the senior special,” said Betty Goyne, director of the city-run senior community center in Westminster, which has issued its own discount directory since the late 1970s.

“They feel awkward and self-conscious, because it’s like telling others--and reminding themselves--that they are getting older,” Goyne said. “But believe me, these same people, who also take a lot of trips, will not turn down the discounts. They realize these are good deals. They have learned to swallow their pride.”

The resistance to the senior discount concept seems even livelier farther down the age scale.

This is especially true, marketing analysts say, of the baby boomers--that vast generation in their 30s and early 40s who are attempting to raise families, nurture careers and juggle debts in increasingly uncertain economic times.

“Many younger people feel they aren’t getting their fair share of the American Dream right now, that Social Security and Medicare as we know it may not even be around when they reach 65. To them, the senior citizens who keep demanding more benefits seem like ‘greedy geezers,’ ” said sociologist Gilford of Cal State Fullerton.

In the next century, baby boomers will become the largest-ever senior citizen generation. Americans 65 and over will compose nearly 18% of the population in 2020, compared to 12.5% today. But one thing seems certain to market watchers like Katie Sloan of AARP. With the economy more subject to down spins, she said, it doesn’t look like baby boomers as senior citizens “will have anywhere near the financial leeway, the discretionary income, that many of their parents and grandparents now enjoy.”

Baby boomers’ resentment is understandable, said Gilford: “They perceive much of the older generation as financially safe, as having a ball traveling around, and then on top of all that, getting all those senior discounts.”

Yet, specialists suggest, this backlash may not be that deep or lasting, considering the fact that baby boomers--whose oldest members are next in line to be classified as older Americans--are more informed of and sensitive to the aging process than any previous generation.

Cornelia Pechmann, an assistant professor of marketing at UC Irvine, explained it this way: “This increased awareness comes, of course, from direct observation--not only from how it is changing us but how the process is affecting our own parents and grandparents. Whatever benefits them, benefits us.”

A case in point from Pechmann, who is 32: “Whenever my parents, who live back East, travel to Southern California, they always fly out here . . . using senior discounts all the way--but of course!”

Senior Clout

The lucrative land of senior discounts is surprisingly large.

Hotels: The Dana Point Resort offers rooms at a discount to members of the American Assn. of Retired Persons. The Ritz-Carlton offers a 25% discount on standard rooms to those over 55. Four Seasons Hotels offers its corporate rate to people over 60.

Residential rebates: The Wellington, a retirement residence in Laguna Hills, offers a $20 credit against the next month’s rent if residents are served a meal not to their liking. The credit also applies if problems with their apartments, such as a leaky faucet, are not responded to within 30 minutes of notification or corrected in 24 hours.

Sports teams: The Los Angeles Clippers offer $2 off regular admission price to those 60 and over. The Los Angeles Kings sell $10 seats for half price, but tickets must be purchased at the ticket office on the day of the game. The Newport Beach Dukes offer a 15% discount to those 65 and older.