Questioning Senior Discounts

There are several reasons an article on senior discounts in USA Today caught my eye.

* By most accounts I am a senior. I am eligible for Social Security, but I continue to work full time.
* I live in Florida where there are an abundance of seniors and discount programs to provide incentives to spend.
* In our microeconomics class we discuss discriminatory pricing. In our macroeconomic class we discuss the funding of Social Security and Medicare versus reducing the federal deficit.

This USA Today article raises a lot of interesting questions for us to ponder. However, I see it as a response to the relative frugality of seniors compared to a youth culture that heavily discounts the future(savings).

I completely understand that I am over generalizing. My parents were survivors of the great depression and far more frugal than my husband and me. My daughter who is in her late 20's is also frugal (could be genetic)! My husband and I have been married 40 years and have a comfortable nest egg (let's see what the market does to it next), but we are discussing how to budget for his fast approaching retirement. We are a very savings conscious family of three generations. So perhaps attitudes toward savings are more about experiences and family tradition. If so, it will be interestingt to examine how this next generation reacts to the lessons of the great recession. The housing market will be a good sector to watch.