opulations age and start to fall, there is tremendous interest in providing goods and services to the elderly. Yet the hoopla surrounding business opportunities opened up in the silver economy is dominated by things that are not retail: residential care facilities, home care services, housing communities for independent living, geriatric devices and so on. Retailers don’t want to be left behind. Singapore is an appropriate place for the festival. It doesn’t have the highest percentage of aged people in Asia but it does have by far the highest household savings per capita, twice as high as its nearest rivals, Korea and Japan. This means the elderly in Singapore have, and will have, a greater capacity and willingness to spend on goods and services for themselves and their loved ones. But there is something else: Singaporeans, along with Hongkongers and Japanese, have the highest life expectancy in Asia, but unlike the other two, Singaporeans are also enjoying a sharp increase in their number of healthy life years. This means retailers need to adapt their thinking: away from the traditional ageing products like pharmaceuticals, and more toward the lifestyle needs of people who are old but relatively affluent and not on their last legs. So advances in wearable technology, premium health and beauty products (including both cosmetics and supplements), activewear, food, fashion and home appliances all increasingly come into play. Product design also needs to be addressed; for example, retailers need packaging that doesn’t take a hammer or an Olympic wrestler to break into it. Janice Chia, Managing Director of Ageing Asia, which is staging the Singapore conference, said Singapore’s ageing market potential would reach an estimated US$72 billion by next year. Retailers will want a big slice of it. China Another country with a high life expectancy and where a sharply rising percentage of people are living those years healthy is China, where the potential ageing market nex year is estimated at $2.6 trillion. China has a population over age 60 of about 300 million. About one-in-five Chinese is over 60 and by World Bank definitions that makes it a ‘super-aged’ country, a situation partly deriving from the longstanding one-child policy that was abandoned only in 2016. The silver economy could grow to as much as 10 per cent of GDP over the next decade and the Chinese Government is now busy trying to implement strategies to address the needs of the elderly. One of these is a co-operative public-private push to develop consumer goods in categories like clothing, wearable technology, transport, food, pharmaceuticals and leisure goods.   While the focus on merchandise is welcome, the government is also cognisant of the fact that population ageing is driving an increasing share of consumer spending toward services, including food and beverage. Services are now estimated to account for up to 45 per cent of China’s household spending and it is growing. That has implications not only for retailers but also for mall developers who need to adapt their tenant mixes to the new reality. Fortunately, since age demography is a gradual process, landlords have time to act. Property brokerage firm CBRE is reporting that food and beverage tenants alone are accounting for as much as 40 per cent of leasing activity. Japan, Korea and the others Japan and Korea are both super-aged as well, with 36 per cent and 28 per cent of their respective populations over 60 years old. Both countries have high and climbing household savings rates and seniors, therefore, can continue spending. This is good news, particularly for department stores, whose traditional target customer is now getting on in years. For developing countries in the region, however, the situation is different. Here’s where things start getting problematic from the standpoint of mid-market retail opportunities for retailers. Countries like Thailand, Vietnam and India have improving absolute life expectancies, along with increasing ‘healthy’ life years, but very low household savings per capita and not much in the way of age pensions to fall back on. (For example, the International Labour Organization stated that only about one-in-three Vietnamese over age 65 have access to an age pension and the numbers are heavily skewed toward men, despite Vietnam being a socialist state.) Often, the social safety net for seniors consists of their own children and other family members.  In Thailand and other developing countries across Asia, many elderly still work, predominantly in agriculture, fishing and basic services, almost always in the informal sector of the economy. This doesn’t constitute a deep pool of discretionary income and in a lot of cases, people are still well below the poverty line. No more foot-dragging In the more developed parts of the world, the situation regarding the quality of retail served to older consumers is reminiscent of foot-dragging by retailers in serving other trends in society. It seemed to take aeons for fashion retailers to wake up to the fact that people were getting bigger, and to offer genuinely non-frumpy fashion in plus sizes for the ‘big’ consumer. Or wider aisles in their stores. Now, with population ageing, the stakes are even higher. The products themselves are not the only things at issue, there is also the aforementioned packaging design. The shopping experience is another, and the fact that although more of these older shoppers are digitally enabled they still like to shop in stores. This makes things like conspicuous and clear signage and checkout convenience critically important. For shopping online, the design interface is just as important (recall Taobao, which pioneered a senior-friendly app with larger fonts and more convenient payment options). In countries with healthy ageing populations and high saving rates like Singapore and China, healthy ageing puts a lot of money on the table. Just as big-sized people didn’t want to be stuck in frumpy clothes, healthy agers with money to spend will want more than just 10 bottles of pills.