We go along too readily with marketers that try to sell us stuff by categorizing us in age-groups.
I was in a service-area cafeteria on a busy highway just ahead of a woman conducting a bus tour. As I was getting coffee, the manager came out to speak to her. I heard her tell him she had 48 people in the bus and could they be served. He said of course and then asked her: "How many children, how many adults, how many seniors?"
I was put off by his distinguishing adults and seniors and started thinking of how many times I hear about "pre-teens," "young adults," "thirty-somethings," and the other "demographic" designations that seem to have only a little to do with things like age-groups' needs and demands on society and everything to do with marketing.
I started paying attention and was overwhelmed by how many age-circumscribing remarks I'd been tuning out before. I heard people constantly classified by age as purchasers of "entry level" cars or computers, as "upsizing" or "downsizing" their homes, or as likelier to order salads or burgers at fast-food chains.
But if it's bad that those who try to manipulate our purchases are fixated on age, it's worse that we cooperate with them. Listen to how people you know use marketers' jargon to justify their decisions to buy a particular house or car or pair of shoes. And notice how obligingly they respond to cues about where to go and what to buy at their age.
The cues are anything but subtle. A local restaurant stopped using tablecloths and changed from low-level soft rock to high-level hard rock and rap to attract "a younger crowd" and, of course, to increase their customer turnover. Same food, same prices; but the clientele changed completely. What got to me was older people I know who used to frequent the restaurant talking about it "being time" they found another place to eat, and younger people I know sounding as if the restaurant was now their own.
What's the ethical issue here? Obviously, it's discrimination. If you get people to think of themselves in terms of age categories regarding their "life style"--another marketer's idea to target products--you effectively get them to accept exclusion by selling them inclusion. For every shop or car they see as "right for their age," there are dozens of shops and cars that are suddenly "wrong" for them. There's already too much categorizing in our time; we shouldn't aid and abet.
