Tag Archives: Minnesota Lynx

Don’t Patronize Products that Patronize You

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At a time of life when my income is increasingly limited, with a set monthly amount from Social Security, a small pension from my years as a newspaper journalist and whatever I can scratch up from contract work, everyone is pitching me to spend money on stuff I neither want nor need.

The neighborhood newspaper I subscribe to invariably has advertising inserts for pricey senior living buildings that deliver less than what they promise, if my late mother’s experience is any example. The spam calls from people wanting to sell me burial insurance have morphed from being a joke (talk about feeling old!) to merely an annoyance, especially after I’ve told the caller that I plan to be cremated.

But the most egregious examples of unwanted sales pitches are the omnipresent ads in my personal Gmail account. Every time I check email, which is multiple times a day from my iPhone, at least two new “sponsored” emails pop up, many advertising products or experiences I have never purchased or even searched for online.

Recent examples include:

  • An ad for a women’s “three-wheel e-bike” by a manufacturer that clearly views the word “tricycle” as a turnoff, though that’s what it is;
  • A promise of “$5,000 off any trip” from Overseas Adventure Travel, which specializes in expensive luxury group tours, including for solo (read: widowed and well-heeled) travelers;
  • Ads for Eileen Fisher’s “responsibly made” tops that offer “the right mix of comfort and style” — flattering, just-below-the-waist designs meant to hide the thicker midsections women develop after menopause; and
  • Skechers slip-in shoes, all flats, with catchy names like “Classy Cruiser” and “Reggae Slim.” This may be the most practical example of all, given that no woman I know in her 60s wears high heels for any but the most special occasion, and even then, she likely packs her walking shoes in a discreet cloth bag.

Despite living in an Amazon-influenced era, I don’t like to shop online. Plus, I’ve grown increasingly impatient with advertising now that I record the TV shows and women’s basketball games I want to watch precisely so I can zip through the commercials — a shocking number of which are for prescriptions with a litany of scary or smelly side effects.

But that’s not the problem. What disturbs me is advertisers’ assumptions about seniors, which rarely line up with the realities and reflections of my post-career life. Or with the passions, politically fueled anxieties and inevitable physical afflictions that dominate conversations with my friends.

“The public’s perception of aging is . . . antithetical to how most older people feel and what experts in the field know to be true.”

National Center to Reframe Aging

Not all of us want to travel abroad, pamper our pets, fix up our homes (we’re lucky if they’re paid for) or attend cultural events that occur downtown at night. Yet that is what the sponsored ads in my Gmail account push: new windows, cheaper internet, a dinner theater 23 miles away, a Tai Chi walking program that looks laughably slow for a fitness walker who moves 18,000 steps a day.

What I want from Gmail is no ads at all. I’m no one’s target market anymore. Or at least push the products and places I care about: good face cream, artsy earrings and glasses frames, locally owned bookstores and bike shops. By this age, I know what I want and need.

I understand, sort of, how algorithms work. That an ad not just for L.L. Bean but for their fleece-lined bedroom slippers and winter-walking Stabilicers will show up as banner ads on other websites after I’ve scrolled the Bean site for just those items.

So, yes, I get it that many of the sponsored ads in my personal Gmail — which, oddly, never show up in my work-related account — relate to some web search or another. I don’t want an e-trike (at least not yet), but I do read “Bicycling” magazine online. Maybe the ad for shapeless shirt dresses from Maye, a company I’ve never heard of, is there because the algorithm knows I’m 68, an age at which many women have developed enough self-confidence and common sense to prioritize comfort over body-hugging fashion.

Or am I giving the faceless algorithm too much credit?

A recent article titled “Marketing to Seniors,” which promised “transformative insights” into reaching my digital-wary demographic, manages to be both heartwarming and offensive — not unlike the senior-focused ads I see.

  • On the upside: The urge toward “straightforward language” and “offering customer support through phone calls rather than automated messages” strikes me as practical and respectful. Whatever our level of digital savvy, or lack thereof, we Baby Boomers are comfortable and conversant with a telephone.
  • On the downside: The article’s call to feature photos of people “5 to 10 years younger than your target demographic” because “it’s how folks tend to see themselves” may be accurate, I’m sorry to say, but it also is blatantly ageist and emotionally cruel.

Employing younger people to sell products and services to seniors plays on the insecurities and fears of older women, in particular, who for decades have been barraged with the fiction that only youth can be attractive.

Photo by Rosa Rafael on Unsplash

In the United States alone, the beauty industry is expected to garner $106 billion (yes, B for billion) in 2026. And now the folks who are marketing senior housing, flowing clothing and expensive foreign trips are instructed by advertising experts to employ models whose only sign of authentic aging is coiffed white hair.

I’d like people my age — women, especially — to fight ageism by boycotting products that imply growing old is a shameful condition to be hidden and denied. Older Americans Month in May urges us “to recognize the contributions of older adults” and “to raise awareness concerning elder abuse and neglect.” Let’s also grant older people the dignity of portraying us as we are, even if the advertising art directors think their necks will never wrinkle, their eyebrows won’t thin and their thighs will forever remain smooth.

Shopping can stimulate cognitive processes, provide physical benefits, and function as a leisure pursuit that promotes social engagement. 

Comfort Keepers, “Benefits of Shopping for Older Adults“

It isn’t that I dislike spending money. I’m as susceptible as anyone to the dopamine fix of treating myself to things and experiences, whether new walking shoes or a weekend getaway. But as I grow older, I am both more philanthropic — if by “philanthropy” you also count generosity with your grown children — and more intentional about where I invest my finite resources.

Age has shifted my priorities and patterns.

I enjoy shopping, especially for groceries, and try to support the shops and restaurants in my neighborhood, especially after seeing several go dark during COVID. Recently I learned that elderly folks (not quite where I am yet) benefit from in-person shopping because it gets them outside, keeps them moving, prods them to make decisions and handle money, and forces interactions with others younger than themselves.

Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on Unsplash

Less need or desire for stuff, an aversion to online shopping and a commitment to supporting my own community all make me a poor target for the products that companies are pitching me online. Except maybe this one: The You Are Enough Co. spammed me with an ad recently for “Dear Person” T-shirts and sweatshirts.

Curious about the concept, I clicked through and learned that You Are Enough aims to boost and normalize mental health awareness through clothing that proclaims to onlookers: “The world needs you” and “You are great.”

I may buy one and gift it to an older woman who needs a reminder that, no matter how much society tries to convince her to hide her age, she is fine just as she is. She’s earned her wear and wrinkles.

Then again, maybe I’ll keep that T-shirt for myself.

‘Could’ve Been a Contender’: Why I Love Women’s Sports

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It’s not just that I’ve jumped on the Caitlin Clark bandwagon, though I have — along with the 14,624 other people who filled the Barn at the University of Minnesota this week to watch her Iowa Hawkeyes take on my alma mater’s Golden Gophers.

Nor is it that I watched the U.S. Women’s National Team ascend the ranks in the “beautiful game” — a foreign sport, in my youth — in the 1990s and early 2000s, at the very time that my two sons were starting to excel at soccer.

It took 2 minutes and 12 seconds against Michigan to make women’s scoring history.

My father and older brother followed the Purple People Eaters–era Minnesota Vikings when I was a kid, back when the team played outdoors and years before one of the fearsome foursome became a state Supreme Court justice. I’ve watched wistfully from the sidelines while my siblings bond each year over their Fantasy Football League.

But now I, too, have found my sport to follow — women’s college basketball in the Midwestern-based Big 10 — and I’m finally feeling it. Here’s what the hoopla is all about!

I’d written off sports as just a guy thing, a way for men to connect and converse while revealing nothing of themselves. I saw the energy but missed the emotions beneath the surface. Following a team through highs and lows, through wins and losses, through “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” — to call up Jim McKay on ABC’s The Wide World of Sports — is a rush, a disappointment, a heady exhilaration, a shoulder-drooping drag.

It’s a slice of life in a single season.

Kate Brenner-Adams’ crop art from the Minnesota State Fair photographed at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. “Sports are a microcosm of society,” she says, “therefore inherently political.”

As my career was winding down, my husband and I started going to the occasional Thursday morning concert at Orchestra Hall (the ones with free coffee, cellophane-wrapped doughnuts and an audience base that makes me feel young). Those are lovely and elegant, and they underscore my exposure to classical music as a kid.

But what I really enjoy are the rowdy, rollicking Gopher women’s basketball games that we began attending last year to see Lindsay Whalen coach and then committed to with season tickets this year, hoping that new coach Dawn Plitzuweit could coalesce the team.

David and I met at the University of Minnesota, and we followed the Gophers nominally when Whalen was an award-winning 5-foot-9 point guard and, of course, stuck with her storied pro career with the Minnesota Lynx. David says women play basketball the way he did, “below the rim.” (I firmly believe the NBA should raise the men’s rim, but that’s a different story.)

Basketball is not the only sport where fans are paying more attention to female athletes. Minnesota now has a team in the Professional Women’s Hockey League, and the Minnesota Aurora, a pre-professional soccer team, has been selling tickets and winning matches — all with an honorable and enviable mission: “to create pathways for women and girls to reach their potential, on and off the field.”

Women my age rarely had that chance. Title IX, which mandated equity in sports at institutions that receive federal funds, passed in 1972. I was 15 years old, a leggy, athletic girl who was a cheerleader and took dance lessons and loved to bike and was always a fast sprinter (“for a girl”) but who never was allowed to be an athlete, to play on a team.

I see them now in the stands, women like me in their 60s and 70s or even older, some with white hair and walkers. These are women who have lived through historic shifts in our society — abortion rights won and lost, better pay and political representation, the Violence Against Women Act extended to lesbians, immigrants and Native American tribal lands — and who are showing up and cheering loudly, despite being told for years that they were lesser, they couldn’t compete, they weren’t enough.

Following women sports, being a vocal and unabashed fan, lets us demonstrate that we still are standing strong.

Image courtesy of Reader’s Digest

I was working as a “Women in Business” columnist at the Saint Paul Pioneer Press in 1999, when Brandi Chastain kicked the winning goal for Team USA in the Women’s World Cup final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. My sister Debbie and her family were there. “I actually overheard somebody in the stadium say, ‘They play just like boys!’” she recalls now.

As one of few women on the newspaper’s business desk — and the only one who focused on women’s issues — I was the go-to when male colleagues wanted to get the “woman’s point of view.”

Sure enough, after the sports section displayed the infamous photo of Chastain on her knees, eyes closed, fists raised in the air after she had ripped off her soccer jersey in celebration, my editor called me over to his desk. Was her action unsportsmanlike, inappropriate, simply in poor taste? Or was it sexist that Chastain was getting grief for her exuberance when male players ripped off their jerseys all the time?

And then came the predictable: What do you think of this, Amy?

Newsweek celebrates Brandi Chastain and women’s soccer: July 19, 1999.

It was one of those rare moments when I had the perfectly timed response. Pausing to give the photo a once-over, I looked my male editor in the eye and said calmly: “Nice abs.” And then I turned and walked away.

Twenty-five years later, Target Center in Minneapolis is sold out for the Big 10 women’s basketball tournament in March, a women’s sports bar is opening in the Seward neighborhood several miles away and Brandi Chastain, now 55, has framed the famous sports bra, which hangs in her home. As for me? I barely know a fast break from a field goal, but I’m having the time of my life — watching young women excel at opportunities that were denied me, and supporting them every step of the way.