No Discounts for Millennials

You’ve seen them on the bus, in museums, and at movie theaters: senior discounts. As a reward for being old, senior citizens pay a quarter less for bus fare, a small fortune less for movie tickets, and receive discounts generally all over the place.

If you’re a twentysomething, or part of what some journalists have colorfully called “the screwed generation,” you may be wondering: why not me?

Priceonomics’s Alex Mayyasi takes a contentious stance in his post, “Why Does the Senior Citizen Discount Still Exist?” He says that the idea that senior citizens require financial help stems from the high percentage of seniors who were living in poverty after the Great Depression. Federal programs like Social Security and Medicare dramatically decreased that percentage. Mayyasi now says that millennials are being screwed over by the recession and are in a very vulnerable place, so maybe they should get a discount, too. If I made a list of things that probably would never come into existence, a discount for millennials would be on that list.

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