This might be the view from Valcluse but the 65+ cohort spend LESS than any other age group below them. Retirees in general have a house and car and that's about it. They are extraordinarily frugal with their spends and have limited liquidity.

True, travel and some luxury goods are in demand for cashed up Boomers with more than $1.5 in savings and investments.

The reality is that many of the post war generation will scrape by and now we have a Government who is considering raising the pension age to 70. The Boomers own 40 percent of the nations houses and apartments. I wouldn't push that line too much as the grandkids currently have bugger all chance of owning a house.

It's true that peer to peer selling as you see in Bunnings, where older workers serve older customers, is a very good idea. But I wouldn't make too much of the so called piles of cash the Boomers have stored away.

Just because you are just scraping by, Malcolm (Paddy) King, you shouldn't assume everyone else is the same.

Get used to it - you're the one who is different.

Stay with me DavidL. Don't go all wobbly on me. I'm only in my early 50s plus have been very lucky with work and investments. I worked in DEEWR Labour Strategy in this area and the article is empirically wrong.

It's true that APIA and Harvey World Travel and others are trying to garner the rich Boomer but by far the majority of first cohort Boomers (1945-54) own one asset: their home. The GFC wiped out billions of super savings, that's why many older workers will have to keep on working. It's not a case of surfeit, it's a case of necessity.

Stories like this send a message to Abbott that it's 'easy living' for the Boomers - why not raise the pension eligibility age?

<<While the over 65s constitute 14% of the population (and the fastest growing demographic) they feature in only 4.7% of advertisements and even here are targeted for only a limited range of products.>>

Somebody must have got the message that older people would not put up with being advertised at - Thank God for that!

Do you want to have good business relations and sell your goods to older people? Then here is a tip:

!! Stop moving your stores around, opening and closing every week in a different location and also stop shuffling the goods within your stores. !!

Older people need not have to follow the latest and greatest - older people look for stability, they want the assurance that if they need something they can always visit the same store they have been in last year and then find what they need in the same area within that store.

If it's too hard to walk around looking for what one needs, then one may just as well find it online, and if it can be found more easily overseas, then so be it, regardless of price. In other words, save older people both their feet and their eyes, so online too make it as simple and direct as possible to find what people need.

- Yes, older people know what they need. If you attempt to tell them that you know better, then rightly so they will see it as insult and won't come!

Some years ago, I did what most retailers/service providers do today, judge a book by its cover.
Only to be told by a sharp eyed partner, the old bloke in the shabby singlet, paint flecked shorts and well worn thongs, was the richest bloke in our part of the country.
It was a mistake I never repeated!
Rhrosty.

Most of what I buy is for me. I had to budget all my life but now what I have left is mine, for me.
Retail store assistants don't even see me when I enter their stores.
When I purchase on line, no one makes the judgement that I am too old, too poor, etc.
I am treated well and receive excellent service.
Sadly, most of this service comes from outside Australia.