A Baby Boomer and didn’t know it…

After nearly two decades in the senior living/housing industry, I have to learn now a new vocabulary. Words like pod-casting, micro site linkage, electronic data task protection, I-pod, Tivo, and an endless list of mind boggling words enough to fill dozens of pages in Webster’s dictionary (is it still printed or digitalized?). By the way, spam to me was a strange pink meat sort of thing in an odd shaped can. Now I learn it is something to be filtered out. Go figure!
I have been preaching for the past five or six years that the senior living industry is metamorphosing into hospitality, resort living industry. This change is not less critical and important than the change from room sharing in nursing homes to private apartments in Assisted Living.
Since beginning of my career in the senior housing/living industry nearly 20 years ago countless words have been written on the baby boomer generation. Baby boomer, that’s me, I was born in the late fifties and am a late boomer. Over the past five or six years it was the boomers we all had to understand, cater to, and pander to. They made the decisions. They were the subject of all our consumer research.
Well my fellow boomers, we’re not so powerful anymore, as we slip into our mature years, and are scorned by the younger generation in our industry as the very same dinosaurs we ourselves used to laugh at. Yes, many of us have money, some second homes, and we are true professionals in making leisure decisions. But are we the major decision makers on retirement living? – Hell No! Too often we wait until the day comes and someone in the family is forced to make the decision for us.
In this era of new choices for retirement living and aging by design one of the most important decision of our life is or soon will be, where to retire? My advise to any of us “old folk” who procrastinate in making this important decision and let default take it’s course, you are taking a chance and allow someone to make this decision for you and decide on your tastes and experiences dictate the retirement community may be not worrying about amenities and services of today, let alone tomorrow, are truly going to be dinosaurs.
Make no mistakes retirement living is a consumer (baby boomer) driven profession and the consumers’ tastes change increasingly quickly, locally and globally and operators of retirement communities know well that the days of being all things to all men, (there’s my age showing, how politically incorrect can I be?) okay, all things to all “persons” (Yuk!!) are long gone.
All this is a long winded way of saying I’ve had to learn a new word “blog”. I had never paid it much attention until a friend asked me if I could write a regular blog. After I realized that it wasn’t something vaguely primordial, I agreed without having an idea what I’d agreed to. You’ve now read my first blog and more may come.