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Where’s something wrong with the commercial world when it comes to dealing with older customers. For one, most of the printing is  too small. Take the directions on medicine bottles! It’s between 6 and 9 points on aspirin and a host of common painkillers and remedies for colds and on vitamins. Obviously the type is too small for older people to read easily, although they are the major users of such medicines. Writings on tablet and capsule strips are even less decipherable. 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.

The better educated the shopper, the more he or she makes decisions based on what’s written on labels, boxes, tubes and jars. Such reading, for example, is crucial to selling skin-care and other health and beauty items. Much retailing depends on the written word now, more than ever before. And so the readability of what’s written on various items of packaged foods or toiletries assumes added importance for the buyers. Apparently most designers who create labels, packaging, and other printed items are younger folks who seem to have little idea how these would look to people who must eventually read them.

Conceded, designers are under pressure to squeeze in more and more copy; they usually do so by making the print smaller. May be bigger packages are a solution, though these would pose the problem of occupying more shelf space, not to mention the waste of more good trees. Maybe labels could make greater use of graphic images. Anyway, some innovative thinking on the subject is called for.

Human eyes begin to falter around the age of forty, and even healthy ones are usually impaired by their sixties. With age, the lens becomes more rigid and the muscles holding it weaken, meaning you can’t focus on small type. And less light reaches your retina, meaning the world looks a little dimmer than it once did. The typical 50-year old’s retinas receive about one quarter less light than the average 20-year old’s. That means lots of stores, restaurants and banks should be brighter than they are now.

The yellowing of the ageing cornea means that certain subtle gradations of colour will become invisible to a majority of senior citizens. More people can trip on stairs as the clear distinction between the step and the riser disappears. And many older shoppers will find it difficult to perceive the difference between blue and green. They need a lot more of black and white and red and much less of blue.

Commercial typeface almost everywhere is a challenge for ageing eyes. The nutritional information on the side of a cereal box, the laundering instructions on a shirt, the directions on a hair dye, the manual for a camera, or the song titles on a CD. And let’s not forget restaurant menus, train timetables, government forms, thermometers and the buttons on washing machines/air conditioners and remote controls for TVs and VCR. The numbers on cell phones are miniaturising themselves out of the vision of senior citizens.

Owing to failing eyes and arthritic fingers, ATMs will have to adapt, too—the buttons will have to become larger, as well as the screens and the words on them. And what about telephone directories! Even morning papers using body text of roughly 9 point type are hard on ageing eyes. In stores, again, it’s not uncommon to find items of interest to older people stacked on lower shelves and those for teenagers at eye level. Teenagers can bend and see better, whereas it would be a definite help if older people have things at eye level involving less bending.

Happily, a few stores in some countries are putting up magnifying glasses on chains attached to shelves of common remedies. This is a clever makeshift solution, but it’s not going to be enough. Today’s senior citizens endure umpteen minor forms of discrimination, without complaint, as their lot in life. But the new crop of affluent oldsters will surely rebel, sooner than later—they are not going to accept vexations lying down. They weren’t force-fed on the virtues of sacrifice, self-denial and delayed gratification as were the elderly in the past. They did not absorb the quaint notion that to be old is to accept infirmity and inability stoically, as one’s lot in life. Another thing that markedly distinguishes today’s affluent oldsters from the seniors of the pre-inflation era is the attitude towards the spending of money. To the latter, the ruling prices are too shocking for their comfort. Today’s oldsters are mentally adjusted to the prevailing phenomenon of rising prices. And they are strongly touched by the current worldwide consumerist culture.