Designed by Senior Citizens

A veritable Rubik's cube

When did Walgreen's become a geriatric outlet mall? It's one of the strangest business plans put forward since McDonald's decided to subjugate blacks with their urban marketing initiative. It's also impossibly cruel to market your store as a haven for senior citizens, and then stock the shelves full of items your company would presume they have no hope of figuring out how to use. Including but not limited to: digital cameras, DVD players, medicines with child-proof lids, Crocs. Walgreen's might be the company doing this most explicitly, but they are not alone in their initiative to make the elderly weak(er) by robbing their intellectual bones of a much needed proverbial calcium. No, other businesses have joined in on this trend, and even worse, they are now encouraging the elderly to just give up and embrace their ignorance. Mocking and insulting the elderly to their faces has become as American a past-time as baseball or Ponzi schemes, but do we really want to encourage this shit? From computers to cell phones, it seems that now a days the senior citizen is lost in a sea of technological hopelessness, on a raft made of motherboards and CD players. I think iPad commercials should just be a series of old people throwing up their hands and shrugging, "I don't know". Oh me, oh my! What's a grandmother to do? All these recipes and no place to store them electronically. Until now...

Most seniors can barely see over the keyboard of a normal computer.

Introducing, The MyGait PC. It's the out of control vehicle, careening onto a sidewalk full of pedestrians, of personal computing. Complete with an infantile operating system and letters so large they almost bleed over the keys of the keyboard, this is the ultimate in luxury coddling. Let me tell you, there is nothing that empowers a septuagenarian more than being told they are too stupid to learn to send an e-mail the way "the young whippersnappers do". This ain't shooting down Japs in the Pacific, Grandpa. No, this is spreadsheets and search engines. MyGait PC to the rescue! My, in this instance, meaning belonging to a senior; Gait, meaning this thing cruises along the hallowed corridors of the internet the same way you hobble down the halls of the elder shelter (the nickname those hip, young 60 year olds are using for the Convalescent home). If only you could toss a couple tennis balls on the legs of this bastard, then you'd be cruising along- although probably still under the speed limit and possibly asleep at the wheel. The important thing here is that the creators of this product understand your needs as a feeble, old creature because they too are feeble and old. Wait, what?!

When the implications of your product are that seniors are incapable of learning how to use a computer, but then you slap a label on your product that says, "designed by senior citizens", just what the fuck kind of Alice-in-Wonderland, topsy-turvy bullshit are you trying to sell here? Even worse, maybe the implication isn't that they are incapable of learning, but just shouldn't be bothered. What pressing engagements are keeping the elderly from making time to learn a new craft? Especially one that the entirety our civilization is so inescapably moving toward at breakneck speeds (known to seniors as: the speed limit). Don't get me wrong, old people can be fucking stupid, but most of the time it has less to do with cognitive abilities and more to do with a lack of patience. Learning something new can be fun if you don't get thrown into it by a company whose sole purpose in being is to convince you that it's beyond your comprehension and so you need their service. That just creates frustration and a weak(er) bladder.

The Walgreen's Agenda

For practicality's sake, I understand adding certain types of functionality. I wouldn't begrudge a blind man his braille, just as I think that large type on a keyboard, or a nice, intuitive zoom function for an operating system are great accommodations for those with physical debilities. But these "work-right-out-of-the-box" features insinuate that they aren't even capable of matching colors and shapes- basically all the skill-set required to plug in a computer. Some computers use up to 10 wires! Are you crazy?! Don't leave him alone in there, Grandpa's gonna accidentally hang himself trying to put that shit together!

Maybe I'm looking at this all wrong, but it just seems kind of rude to tell the generation that fought the second world war that they don't have what it takes to master the intricacies of Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button. And maybe, just maybe, they wouldn't be so goddamn ignorant when it came to technology if we stopped selling them products that told them they were.