The ‘Golden Years’ : From Plumbing to Pizza, Retailers Use Senior Discounts to Tap Into a Burgeoning Market

This surely has been the consumer age of MTV and “thirtysomething,” a time of hellbent youth and prime-time yuppiedom.

But the past decade has also produced one very hot, although less flamboyant, trend--the senior citizen discount.

Its rise in the American marketplace is 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 phenomenon has generated its own bustling network of retailers from New York and Florida to Southern California. At first, the discount movement focused on geriatric services, but now it has won over national retailers and hotels as well as neighborhood drugstores, beauticians and plumbers.

It also has helped to project a new image--a senior citizen chic, if you will--for a growing segment of older Americans who represent a 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,” says sociologist Rosalie Gilford, an associate academic director at Cal State Fullerton’s Ruby Gerontology Center.

Now, with people living longer and healthier, “the image has swung the other way. Now it’s big RVs and cruises, the real leisure class in America today.”

To anyone unfamiliar with senior discounts, the range of price cuts and services can be eye-opening. Among the examples:

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

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

Fifty???!!!

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

For years, the minimum in many senior programs has been creeping downward--first 60, then 55, now even 50--in recognition, researchers say, of the age when physical health generally begins its most significant decline.

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.

While the golden years are starting younger, the demographics are changing even more dramatically at the other end of the scale.

We are living far longer and healthier--life expectancy is now close to 72 for men and 79 for women. Increasingly, more senior citizens are enjoying active lives into their 70s and 80s.

So, the bottom line for businesses is that today’s older Americans make up an unusually lucrative consumer market, says Frank Conaway, president of an Orange County-based consulting firm that specializes in the senior field.

While most retirees live on a fixed income with little if any extra spending money, specialists say that a significant number now enjoy a better fiscal and leisure status. Because of this, specialists say, Americans 50-and-older 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,” says Jon Torp, lecturer in marketing at USC’s Gerontology Center. “They are now ready and willing--and able--to go out and spend money on themselves.”

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,” says George Moschis, director of the Center for Mature Consumer Studies at George State University. “But the concept on an organized basis did not really take place until the late 1960s and early 1970s.”

“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 PR image.”

The best-known early example was New York City’s discount program launched in 1971 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, the discount filed didn’t really take off until the 1980s, when the senior population was soaring--and when older Americans’ became more active and affluent.

In the ‘80s, as more discount directories came out--usually highly localized lists issued by senior community centers, attempts were made to coordinate them as part of larger networks.

One of these is California’s Golden State Senior Discount Program, which was launched in 1981 and at its peak had 325 participating communities, including many in Southern California. 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 IDs.

On a far grander scale, was Southwestern Bell Media Inc.’s Silver Pages directories that served 29 states, including California. Started in 1985, the directories were cancelled three years later.

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

Most market observers say 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,” says UCLA marketing professor Harold Kassarijian.

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

California state agencies, which provided technical assistance to local centers for the Golden State program’s first eight years, reported issuing up to 200,000 membership cards.

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

And marketing consultants like to cite one major survey of consumers age 55 to 79: Only 10% of them said they never used senior discounts.

The “never” or the reluctant-user categories raises the question of age stigma.

“If you are 75 or older, you don’t seem to mind being called a senior citizen,” says 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 these consumers 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,” says 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 says. “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,” says sociologist Gilford. “To them, the senior citizens who keep demanding more benefits seem like ‘greedy geezers.’ ”

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, says 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, explains 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!”