We need to talk about senior discounts
Yes, it's time to bully the elderly.
Every time I use the self-checkout, somehow with consistent unfortunate luck, the person in front of me has either never used self-checkout, touchscreens, or money before. The elderly plop of cottage cheese trembling before me is mired in a 10-minute struggle sesh, utterly confounded as they stare into the abyss. To the passerby, this may seem like a jabbering old fool struggling to keep pace with modern technology, but I see a mere mortal drowning in inevitable irrelevancy, succumbing to the death grip of time’s passage. “YOUNG MAN, WHERE DO I PUT MY COUPONS?? I DON’T MEAN TO YELL, I JUST HAVE TROUBLE CONTROLLING THE VOLUME OF MY VOICE!! DO I WRITE A CHECK??”
It is something between a custom and basic best practices, but whenever a business is trying to acknowledge that life is hard, they offer senior discounts just for being old. To live in 2024 is to live in 2024, and to process what is quite possibly the stupidest of all conceivable timelines is to confront the horrors of Palestinian children being blown to bits existing beside the meta-material of imagining J.D. Vance in drag and singing both parts of an Evanescence song. This is a disorienting experience for a generation that has used both Encarta and Wikipedia, T9 texting and smartphones, but I couldn’t fathom how someone who is 65 and older could process the depths of human depravity and the lightning-pace of shapeshifting cultural norms. How do you explain Brat Summer to someone who has used a segregated water fountain? I suppose that warrants a senior discount. But, then again, all millennials needed to do was make the smart financial decision of being born 30 years earlier, and we’d be comfortable homeowners—so maybe this current crop of senior citizens already have all the advantages they need to get by.
The macro-scale state of senior discounts is weird and fairly bleak when you consider that simply living to 65 can earn you a similar discount to a war veteran. Every industry that is ruled by our super-class of anhedonic or actively sociopathic capitalists is perverted to some degree, but they are signaling that collecting your first Social Security check is equivalent to getting your leg blown off in Normandy. I like to think I could’ve bagged a few Nazis if I had the shot, but if we keep on our current trajectory, the next 30 years will resemble a mass-scale D-Day anyway, so making it to retirement will be its own Purple Heart.
And here’s I know life is difficult for everyone. Instead of businesses offering senior citizens something like a free coffee with every purchase, they’ll instead give them 50 cents off a small cup. Even the mercy is merciless.
When I’m 65, I just want somebody to take my phone away and leave me in the woods.
screams in digital healthcare: iT's BeCaUsE nObOdY tAkEs ThE tImE tO eXpLaIn TeChNoLoGy To ThE eLdErLy!!
Dear Lord. Sam if you make it to 65 you’ll be fine but I’m not so certain we’ll still have woods to leave you in.
True cruelty is that if you make it to the age to get the senior discount and you already have the veteran’s discount you can’t stack them. I don’t even get to look forward to one day getting a whole dollar off…
and as I approach AARP age I do struggle more at the self check out. I have to work my way through each bank card, try the credit card, look for cash. I mean how the hell do you pay for things?
It’s not about the coupons. I’m broke everything is declined but if I look sad and confused with this much grey hair and leave behind some pocket lint and a wrinkled Pizza Hut coupon from the early oughts before I shuffle off in disgrace and abandon my groceries you’ll have more pity.
I’m pseudo old which isn’t quite like living through Normandy, just you know the invasion of Panama and there’s no pension.