Senior discounts getting younger and younger
Many businesses lowering the age to qualify for deals
Like millions of Americans, Greg Petty got sucked into the time warp on his 50th birthday.
Fit and forward- looking, he was confused by an unexpected present: an invitation to join AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons. Thinking it couldn’t be for him, Petty, a magazine publisher who lives in Cary, N.C., crumpled it up and threw it in the trash.
Time stops for no man and neither does AARP. When he was greeted with another membership card on his 51st birthday, he read the material and found that aging had its privileges. “I’ve used it to save on car rentals, hotel stays and lots of other things,” Petty said. “After paying full fare formy entire life, it seems fair to get a discount.”
Welcome to the flexible and often generous world of senior discounts, where prime of life can be considered old and even the wealthy are entitled to special deals. It is a land of shifting perspectives reflecting the realities, economic and otherwise, of a graying America. Look at it one way and you see that many people are living longer, healthier, more active lives than ever before. From this angle, 70 is the new 60.
Another view suggests that 50 is the new 65, as businesses continue to lower the bar on deals for older Americans. Plenty of restaurants still offer the early-bird specials favored by blue- haired women and men in oversize windbreakers, but they are being joined by ski resorts and sky diving outfits, high-tech companies, rock concert promoters, dating services and wedding planners.
Many Americans may recoil at the senior label, but most are happy to enjoy the discounts. AARP reports that 80 percent of its 37 million members say they take advantage of its discounts or deals each year. The website seniordiscounts.com lists more than 270,000 offers pegged to people 50 and older, double the number from years ago.
Yet as more enjoy such benefits while holding the drawbacks of aging at bay, critics are questioning not only the business sense but the morality of age-dependent discounts.
“When the population of older Americans is growing and those people claim a greater share of the country’s wealth, offering someone a discount just because they have reached a certain birthday is on the edge of shameful,” said Ken Dychtwald, president and chief executive of Age Wave, a research and consulting firm that focuses on aging.
Doug Brown, 75, dean of the Anderson School of Management at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, brushes aside such qualms. If a company is willing to offer him a discount, he’s eager to take it. A “born cheapskate,” he got hooked on senior discounts 15 years ago when he paid about half price for a movie ticket.
“I thought, this is the best deal I’ve had since Mom took me to the theater.” He soon founded seniordiscounts.com , whose motto is, “It’s what you deserve.” Though he is financially comfortable, he uses at least a dozen discounts a week, for groceries, pet supplies, carwashes and movie tickets. “I don’t buy anything without asking if they have a discount,” he said.
A debate about senior discounts has taken off since the Pew Research Center reported that older Americans had achieved greater economic gains than other groups. Combing census data, it found that the median income for households headed by Americans 65 and older had increased more than twice as much between 1967 and 2010 as the gains enjoyed by households headed by adults 44 and younger.
Pew also said the net worth of older households grew 42 percent between 1984 and 2009, while that of households headed by adults 35 and younger plummeted 68 percent. “As a result,” Pew reported, “in 2009 the typical household headed by someone in the older age group had 47 times as much net wealth as the typical household headed by someone in the younger age group.”