‘There’s nothing wrong with bingo and chicken,” Tom Kamber said, but went on to explain that you won’t find either in the senior center he runs in Manhattan.
Instead, members of the Senior Planet Exploration Centre are given virtual-reality goggles and other digital gadgets to play with, though most head straight for a wall of computers to check their Facebook accounts or shop online. A group of 15 seniors, some in their 80s, clad in sportswear, huddled around their fitness coach. People come for classes on starting their own businesses, using smartphones, booking travel on the web and setting up online dating profiles.
“We just demystify the technology,” Kamber said, “and away they go.” Businesses could learn from this. With longer lives, more free time and plenty of cash, older people clearly present a “silver dollar” opportunity. In America the over-50s shortly will account for 70% of disposable income, according to a forecast by Nielsen, a market research organization. Global spending by households headed by over-60s could amount to $15 trillion by 2020, twice as much as in 2010, predicts Euromonitor, another market-research group. Much of this will be spent on leisure.
The market has failed to respond to this opportunity, however, even though it has been clear for a long time that the baby boomers would start to retire in larger numbers, in better health and with more money to spend than any previous generation. They feel much younger than their parents did at their age, and most of them have no intention of quietly retreating from the world.
“Retirement used to be a brief period between cruise ships and wheelchairs, with a bout of norovirus,” said Joe Coughlin, who runs the Age Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now, he said, it has become a complete new stage of life, as long as childhood or midlife, which boomers want to structure very differently—“yet we still offer my grandfather’s retirement.”
Over-60s adventure travel has become a booming business opportunity. In America more than 40% of adventure travelers are older than 50, according to the Adventure Travel Trade Association. In Britain older travelers are the largest spenders in the industry, with the fastest growth in the 65-to-74 age group. Instead of comfortable cruises or bus tours, they demand action, from expeditions to the Arctic to cultural trips to Asia.
Another emerging market is dating. Whereas overall divorce rates are falling in some countries, including America, Australia and Britain, “silver splits” are soaring as new pensioners suddenly face the prospect of spending much more time with their partners. Americans over 60 are now getting divorced at twice the rate they were in 1990, and Britons at three times the rate, Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott write in The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity (Bloomsbury, 2016). More than a quarter of the members of Match. com, a popular dating website, are between 53 and 72, and that group is growing faster than any other.
Older people seem more concerned than younger ones about the risks of online dating, prompting the establishment of specialized sites such as Stitch, an online-companionship site with 85,000 members. “There’s more fun to be had after 50,” its promotional video proclaims, adding that “it’s all very safe.” Older customers seem more willing to pay for online memberships than the young, provided that they add value. Stitch screens members and organizes social events, co-founder Andrew Dowling explained.
“Most people want companionship,” he said, “but dating does change with age.”
© 2017 Economist Newspaper Ltd., London (July 8). All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission
Image credits: Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times