What’s wrong with this world? For starters, all the words are too damn small. See this sentence? How could you? Too damn small. How about the morning paper? Forget it. Too damn small. The directions on your jar of organic herbal laxative? Too. Damn. Small. And you’re not even going to try squinting. (It causes wrinkles.) If you can’t read it, by gum, you just won’t buy it. And if you don’t buy organic herbal laxative, nobody will. And if nobody buys it…well, you see where this is going.
Human eyes begin to falter at about age forty, and even healthy ones are usually impaired by their sixties. With age, three main ocular events take place: The lens becomes more rigid and the muscles holding it weaken, meaning you can’t focus on small type; the cornea yellows, which changes how you perceive color; and less light reaches your retina, meaning the world looks a little dimmer than it once did. The issue of visual acuity, already a major one in the marketplace, will become even more critical—not just in some far-off future, but from this moment on.
For example, every current study done of newspaper readership comes back with the same result: Readers want bigger text. Most papers now use body text of roughly nine-point type. (This book is set in 11.75-point type.) Readers want twelve-point or larger. And newspapers are just starting to get it. The Miami Herald, I think, was the first major daily to upsize, then the London Times went from a broadsheet to a tabloid format, with larger headlines and chubbier font, and in 2007 the New York Times actually shrunk the paper size and reduced the number of columns, making the print easier to read, but still uses 8.7-point type. We still have a long way to go, but why did it take this long for them to see us waving at them?
But typeface problems aren’t limited to the publishing business. The main market today for drugstores is older people, and that dependence will only increase. Certainly, of all the words we are required to read in the course of our lives, few are more important than the labels, directions and warnings on drugs, both prescription and over the counter. For instance, we have found that 91 percent of all skin care customers buy only after they’ve read the front label of the box, bottle or jar. Forty-two percent of buyers also read the back of the package. Clearly, reading is crucial to selling skin care and other health and beauty items.
Our studies of drugstore packaging also reveal some interesting comparisons. For instance, the directions, ingredients and/or warning information is ten-point or larger on the packaging for famous brands of hair dye, skin cream, acne medicine and toothpaste. But it’s between six-point and nine-point on aspirin and a host of other common analgesics. It is also between six-point and nine-point on cold capsules and other sneezy-stuffy-drippy products, as well as on vitamins. In other words, packaging designers make it much easier for teenagers to read their pimple cream than for seniors to read their headache or cold remedies. The only concession to age we found was on a box of Polident, which uses eleven-point type for directions and eight-point for ingredients.
This is obviously a failing on the part of the wizards in drug companies’ packaging divisions. But when you realize that most graphic designers, including those who create labels, are in their twenties, it’s easy to see why there has been such a gargantuan miscalculation. The people who make the packaging have no idea how it looks to the people who must read it. Take a gander at publications intended for youthful readers—I mean magazines like Wired or Spin. In all, the type is tiny and frequently printed on backgrounds that provide little contrast. The message is clear: This magazine is meant for the young and will make no concessions to decrepitude. It’s equivalent to when Mick Jagger, a well-born college graduate, slurred and swallowed his lyrics, rendering his music inaccessible to ears that had grown up on Bing Crosby and Patti Page. In the next century, the disparity of age between designers of drugstore products and their most frequent readers will only broaden.
At some drugstores in Florida, magnifying glasses on chains have been attached to the shelves. This is a clever makeshift solution, but it’s not going to be enough. Drugstores report that overall, about one shopper in five seeks employee assistance, but almost double that percentage of senior citizen customers ask for help. Invariably, what they require is the aid of younger eyes to find a product or read a label. You can go through any kind of store and find commercial type that’s a challenge for aging eyes to read. The nutritional information on the side of a cereal box. The laundering instructions on a silk shirt. The directions on hair dye, a self-test for cholesterol, the manual for a camera or software or a DVD player. The specifications on a computer printer ink-jet cartridge. The song titles on a CD. The size on a pair of golf shoes. The price on a paperback. And how are future customers going to find your business—by reading the telephone book or online directory? I can’t read it now. And let’s not forget restaurant menus, train schedules, government forms, birthday cards, postage stamps, thermometers, speedometers, odometers, the radio dial, the buttons on your washer and dryer and air conditioner and refrigerator, your humidifier, your hot-water heater…Did I mention those little stickers that tell you the pear you just bought is, in fact, a pear? How will you ever know? In every instance, the object makes itself forbidding and even hostile to older shoppers by dint of typeface size alone. Today’s senior citizens endure this minor form of discrimination without complaint, as their lot in life. But old boomers, accustomed to having existence itself tailored to their specifications, surely will rebel. By 2025, anything smaller than thirteen-point type will be a form of commercial suicide. Even today, as our vision begins to blur, using nine-point type qualifies as a self-destructive tendency.
But did you notice the dilemma here? The better educated (and therefore better off) the shopper, the more he or she makes decisions based on what’s written on labels, boxes and jars. In fact, all retailing depends on the written word now more than ever before. That would seem to call for putting as much information on products, packaging and merchandising materials as possible. But when designers are told to squeeze in more type, they usually do so by making it smaller. Maybe bigger packages are a solution (although that would cause its own difficulties when it’s time to allocate shelf space, not to mention the waste of more good trees). Maybe labels should make greater use of graphic images. Maybe it’s time for bigger and better signs or talking display fixtures. It might come in the form of a prompt sent to our cell phones or BlackBerries. Or better yet, a completely re-thought-out union of package and instructions—environmentally friendly, with recyclable containers and instructions printed on renewable hemp paper. Maybe we should try all of the above, because we’re going to need a culture-wide jump in type size before long.
And size isn’t the only optical consideration. The yellowing of the aging cornea means that certain subtle gradations of color will become invisible to a large part of the population. So, for instance, more people than ever will trip up (or fall down) stairs as the clear distinction between step and riser disappears. The difference between blue and green will become more difficult for many shoppers to perceive, and yellow will be become much trickier for designers to use—everything will look a little yellow. As a result, packaging, signs and advertising will have to be designed for maximum contrast, not just for the nuanced interplay of colors. We’re going to have to see a lot more black, white and red and a lot less of any other hue.
For instance, we tested merchandising materials for a large California savings bank, and while interviewing departing customers, we found that a large poster on the wall behind the tellers had low recall among older patrons. The poster, which promoted the bank’s Visa Gold card, showed an oversized credit card sitting atop a gold brick. To us, the image was clear. To older eyes, though, the distinction between the card and the gold was invisible, so it looked like a single large, mysterious yellow shape—a meaningless poster, to many people over sixty-five. We studied signage at a major New York hotel and realized that the color scheme for the room numbers, gold lettering on an off-white background, was making the place difficult
to navigate for old eyes.
Finally, the typical fifty-year-old’s retinas receive about one quarter less light than the average twenty-year-old’s. That means lots of stores, restaurants and banks should be brighter than they are now. There can’t be pockets of dim light, not if shoppers are going to see what they’re shopping or even where they’re walking. Illumination must be bright, especially during those times of day when older shoppers tend to arrive. And again, all print will have to be bold and high contrast—dark colors on white (or light) backgrounds.
Why is it that winemakers have begun thinking of their labels as art projects? From Kroger to Trader Joe’s, we’ve documented a kazillion people struggling to read labels. It’s even worse at your local liquor store, where the lighting tends to be dimmer than in the big chains and the shelves can be downright gloomy. I’m not suggesting that a label can’t be pretty or have a kangaroo on it, just that a bottle has to be picked up and glanced at before it gets bought. This is particularly important for small and up-and-coming vintners. Type of wine, country of origin, year, vineyard and a marketing plug—this is all stuff customers are looking for. Proven snotty French brands can do what they want, but all those superb newcomers to the global wine market from Chile, Argentina, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand need to pay attention.
One of our fast-food clients realized that diners over fifty-five were their fastest-growing demographic, despite the fact that the menu boards used type that was almost impossible for older people to see well. The company redesigned the menus using large photos of the food, and even though it meant listing fewer items, sales rose.
Changing the visual world to accommodate aging eyes will be easy compared to the structural alterations that are going to be required. Even in the twenty-first century, old people will be creaky. And keep in mind that senior citizenship is going to last longer than anyone ever imagined—we’ll be old for decades, many of us, longer in some cases than we were young. The same world will have to be navigable by robust sixty-five-year-olds and rickety eighty-five-year-olds. Twenty years ago many of the newly retired bought retirement condos in seaside areas, and some of those apartments were two-or three-story walkups with ocean-view porches—perfect aeries to while away your golden years, it seemed. Now, however, two decades later, many of those springy-gaited sixtysomethings are wheelchair-bound or otherwise unable to climb, rendering those getaways obsolete. How will our stores and streets and malls fare when today’s swarms of baby carriages are replaced by motorized wheelchairs? Doorways, elevators, aisles, cash register areas, restaurant tables, bathrooms, airplanes, trains, buses and private cars will all have to be considerably wider than they are now. Ramps will be required by commercial considerations if not by government fiat. Stairs will be relics. Escalators and moving sidewalks will have to be redesigned and in some cases slowed down. Think of all the multilevel malls that by 2025 will seem inconvenient, if not downright impossible, to one fifth of the population. Remember, older shoppers will be everywhere then, at the drugstore but also at the Gap and Ralph Lauren and Toys “R” Us and Starbucks and Borders, the brand names on which tomorrow’s codgers—we—came of age. Once manufacturers start making stylish, sporty motorized wheelchairs (they’ll be more like street-ready one-person golf carts) and sleek, European-styled walkers, we’ll really see the difference. We’ll need cops to direct pedestrian traffic.
It won’t just be for the immobile that the retail landscape will have to change, either. Even ambulatory older shoppers can’t bend or stretch like they used to. And they don’t really want to—bending and stretching make them feel their age, which is the last thing they want to feel. At RadioShack, the slowest-selling batteries were for use in hearing aids, so the conventional wisdom dictated they should be stocked at the bottom of the freestanding “spinner” fixtures. Of course, who buys hearing aid batteries but old people, the shoppers least able to stoop? When the batteries were moved higher on the spinners, sales went up, and sales of the batteries that were moved to the bottom didn’t drop at all. We looked at the women’s couture floor of a New York department store and found a similar issue. Not surprisingly, many of the women who can afford these clothes are older and therefore tend to be of generous proportions. The designers, however, in order to keep up their image, stock sizes 4 and 6 on the racks and keep sizes 14 and 16 in a back room somewhere, forcing the humiliated shopper to ask one of the painfully thin salesclerks to go and fetch her something a little roomier. Elsewhere in apparel a similar situation pertains: Racks and shelves of underwear or trousers are organized in size order, the smallest up top and the largest way down at the bottom—forcing the fattest and oldest customers to strain themselves, while making it easy on the young and the supple.
(Personally, I’d like to lead a revolt of tall shoppers, those of us who are forced to bend low at every ATM and water fountain in existence. We’re getting taller as a populace, and older, too, meaning that bending will truly hurt in two or three decades.)
In supermarkets, products stocked too low or too high are virtually off-limits to the older shopper; it’s just not worth the trouble, they sigh. I’ll find it elsewhere. This is especially so with heavy items like cases of soft drinks or large boxes of detergent—if you can’t just slide it off the shelf and into your cart, you won’t buy it there. (In fact, for the sake of shoppers of all ages, bulky packages should be shelved at shopping-carttop height.) Remember our pet treats example from chapter 1? Making life easy on older shoppers not only sells goods, it engenders warm feelings among a group that is often badly served by retailers. The geezer who comes in for hearing-aid batteries and doesn’t have to exert himself to get them will probably return when he needs to buy a cell phone or a computer.
Japan is one country that has made great strides in accommodating its aging population. In Japan, land is precious and the malls tend to go up rather than sprawl. In some malls, the escalators move very slowly, not to annoy the sprinting teenagers in the crowd, but in deference to Japan’s aging customer base. Japan’s largest mobile service provider, DoCoMo, has a senior-friendly phone with big buttons and oversized numerals. It bears asking again: Are we as remotely prepared in the U.S., or in Italy or Russia (two other countries with rapidly aging populations), for the same graying consumers? Our over-fifty population is increasingly unable to endure spatial uncertainty. Which is a fancy way of saying that in stores that cover more than thirty thousand square feet, most graying consumers don’t get a kick out of getting lost. Merchants would like their customers to get deliciously lost, not addled-and-simmering-and-ready-to-blow-their-tops lost.
Waiting areas are, or should be, another key concern for merchants and landlords. If your average senior knows she can walk a certain distance and find a place where she can sit, she’s more likely to do just that. HEB, the Texas grocery store chain, recognizes that many Latino families enjoy shopping in multigenerational clusters. Having benches scattered through the store is both an act of kindness and guerilla marketing. Plus, any waiting area is a fantastic selling and communications point. Your audience is captive, ready to read any and all information you give them. You’ll also score especially big points with elderly customers if you make your chairs easy to get into and out of. Those of us in our presenior years who are in positions of moderate influence have a fairly vested interest in preparing the universe for our own dotage. Now isn’t too soon to take a hard look at older shoppers. Before Calvin Klein comes out with a line of designer adult diapers, we need to make our world a lot more senior-friendly.
One of the ongoing challenges in contemporary banking is getting older customers to use ATMs. The automated tellers can be intimidating if you’re not already comfortable with interactive touch-screens and machine-speak. Senior citizens can be taught, but it shouldn’t be by youngsters or officious junior VP wannabes; older customers prefer to be instructed by their contemporaries, all our surveys say—one older bank employee stationed by the teller lines can escort multitud
es of senior customers to ATMs. It also helps to have ATMs within sight of the teller lines; if seniors can watch people use the machines, they lose some of their fearsomeness. Due to failing eyes and arthritic fingers, those ATMs will have to adapt, too—the buttons will have to become larger, as will the screens and the words on them. If the gains in economy made by self-serve are to be maintained, lots of machines will have to be redesigned for older hands and vision. The written directions and buttons on the stamp vending machines and do-it-yourself scales at the post office, for instance, are too small for the aged to manage easily. The same is true of the credit card reader and pump at the self-service gas station line, the commuter train ticket machine and the check-in kiosk at the airport.
Tiny buttons and hooks on clothing—especially the inconvenient back closures on women’s garments—will have to be replaced with simpler fasteners, like Velcro. Cell phone makers currently compete to see who can go smallest, but at some point the phone with the largest buttons and liquid crystal display will be most desirable, at least among older users. (That’ll be at about the same time that cell phones go from being yuppie toys to senior citizen lifelines.) Remote controls for TV, cable box and CD player, the buttons on the camcorder, the notebook computer keyboard—at the current rate, all will essentially miniaturize themselves out of the running for senior citizen dollars. I keep speaking as though all this is going to take place in the future, but that’s wrong: It’s already begun to happen. The world of retailing is having an interesting response.
Where are all the energy and innovation and capital expenditure in retail environments going today? To serve the coming tsunami of ancient shoppers, of course, am I right? No, I’m wrong—they’re all devoted to stores aimed at youthful dollars, like Abercrombie, American Eagle, Roxy and Torrid. The new interactive fixtures and displays coming out of design labs are dazzling—you’re never sure if you’re in a store or a theme park, which is the whole point, I guess. It must be a lot of fun to dream up such gizmos and the stores that contain them. And so it’s no wonder that’s where all the action is.
Why We Buy Page 16
