Gold in Gray: Reflections on Business' Discovery of the Elderly Market

This chapter discusses the financial status of older Americans, and the private sector's changing image of the elderly population from a negligible consumer group to a $500 billion market. The private sector's discovery of the gray market represents a decidedly mixed blessing. Industry's sudden attention to elderly consumers may provide a welcome contrast to an earlier day when the omission of older people from advertisements and other marketing strategies both reflected and helped reify their exclusion from active participation in the cultural and social mainstream. Concurrent with the attempts of such analysts to argue that the elderly population was longer disadvantaged economically were other efforts to shape a new image of the elderly as a vigorous and independent new generation which constituted a new and lucrative consumer market. The private sector's discovery of the consumer may work to promote the tailoring of needed products and services to better meet the requirements of an aging population.