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The Conference Board Review® Article
Leisure Envy
Retiring boomers will focus attention on pastimes and vacations. But there will be naysayers in this new economy -- including retirees’ resentful children.
Linda Nazareth is senior economic analyst for Business News Network and Canada's only full-time on-air economist. From The Leisure Economy: How Changing Demographics, Economics, and Generational Attitudes Will Reshape Our Lives and Our Industries (Wiley). ©2007
"I spoke to the bank and we have some hard decisions to make," says a husband to his wife in a commercial for a financial-services company. The couple, an attractive pair of fiftysomethings, are seated in an upscale restaurant, where they fit in perfectly amidst the crisp white tablecloths and the bottles of mineral water. The premise is that they are discussing their retirement, and she looks anxious at what he has to say. Having enjoyed her discomfort for a minute, his face breaks into a huge smile as he tells her what they will have to decide: "Will it be Provence, or will it be Tuscany?" Sighing with relief, they hug, their future settled. They have plenty of years ahead, and plenty of money with which to enjoy them. Their leisure will be long and well-financed, and tourism officials from both Provence and Tuscany would be well-advised to court them assiduously.
The couple in the commercial is part of what is turning into an elite in-group we can call the "Golden Leisurites." This fortunate subgroup of baby boomers will be the trendsetters in the leisure economy, just as they have been for most of their working lives. Educated and affluent, they will be able to continue their fulfilling careers if they want and stop working when they feel like it. They may take up hobbies ranging from gourmet cooking to model-train collecting, spending lots of money on their new pastimes in the process. They can travel if they choose, or spend time and money adding new media rooms or wildflower gardens to their homes.
They are a marketer's dream, but they do not by any stretch of the imagination represent all of the baby boomers now freewheeling toward 60. A significant number of boomers will not be able to afford high-priced leisure in retirement, and some will barely be able to afford to retire.
But the boomers will hardly be the only group who find themselves divided into leisure haves and have-nots. At the other end of the age spectrum, Generation Y will also face a divide. As a generation, they repeatedly profess their interest in balance, and as they form families, they are likely going to want to achieve that balance by taking time away from the workplace to spend it with their children and to create a life with varied interests. But only a select group will get to do so; the rest will find themselves trying to pay off the mound of debt they amassed early in their lives, through tuition loans or credit-card purchases. Indeed, many may find they are digging themselves deeper and deeper into the debt morass, with the result that they will have to work longer and harder than their parents before them, whom they had hoped not to emulate.
It won't be fair, but it never is. Not everyone made a killing in dotcom stocks either. Not everyone saw the value of his home double in the first two years he owned it, and then double again in the two years after that. There are plenty of ways that the economy has divided North Americans into haves and have-nots. Since the 1980s, one of the biggest divides has been income, and plenty of studies have shown that however strong the economy has gotten, all boats have not been lifted equally, and some not at all. The stock and real-estate markets have created lottery-type wins for some, while leaving others out in the cold.
Now, however, it is time to add another source of divide and envy to the list of things that create haves and have-nots among North Americans: leisure time. Leisure is about to be perceived as a must-have commodity, but there will be definite haves and have-nots among those who manage to acquire it.
Comments? Write a letter to the editor.
Return to the January/February 2008 The Conference Board Review® issue.
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