Boomers to the Rescue

Guess what? We can solve the housing crisis. Seriously. Millions of single-family homes (and boomers own most of them) are underused and on spacious lots. If they were retrofitted they could be converted into “roommate houses” and accommodate backyard cottages.

A developer in Dallas converted his 2,400 square foot home into four studio apartments, each with an outside entrance. Each has connecting doors to the rest of the house that remain unused. He didn’t do it for the income. His purpose was to allow him to claim he lives in a single-family home and is in accordance with local zoning. He calls it a suburban retrofit.

America needs between four and eight million more homes. Meeting that need by building new homes and apartment complexes is too slow and ponderous. But we have 145 million homes that already exist and two-thirds of them are single-family. The loophole then, is to allow the single-family homes to become multifamily.

It’s not clear how many of these single-family homes are owned and occupied by baby boomers, but if they started renting out their empty rooms – voila – big problem solved. Many boomers are already living with one or more of their offspring who are unable to buy homes of their own. How much difference would it make to take in boarders the way people did post-depression?

I’m looking at you baby boomer living in 3,000 sf 4-bedroom house. Why not take in one or more renters? The space is going unused and the extra income can go a long way to reducing your property tax burden. Co-habitation a little to crowded for you? At least consider an accessory dwelling unit out back. More and more communities are altering zoning to accommodate this trend.

Boomers have often been tagged with the bad rap of being selfish, but if we opened up our homes to renters, it might prove to everyone that we can be part of the solution rather than the problem. Just saying.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

Cereal Killers

I’m not feeling sorry for Kelloggs or General Mills, but cereal sales have fallen off sharply. Apparently baby boomers who grew up eating cereal for breakfast and snacking cannot make up for millennials who rarely go in for the milky crunch.

We had Rice Crispies, Corn Flakes, Frosted Flakes, Cheerios, Raisin Bran, Wheaties, Puffed Rice, Sugar Pops, and loads of other brands I can no longer remember. We ate them with milk and if they were covered with sugar, we ate them as snacks.

According to recent surveys, millennials forego the cereal habit because “it’s too much work.” Read that again. Too much work. You have to clean up the bowl and spoon afterward. Almost 40% of those surveyed gave that as the number one reason they prefer the convenience of protein bars or fast-food biscuits. I’ll grant you that some of the cereals we ate back then were just slick sugar delivery systems, but as we got older we turned to Wheat Chex, Rice Chex and other somewhat healthier alternatives. Then we added fresh fruits as well, all in the name of eating smarter.

Cereal makers have not given up on trying to attract millennials and the inducement of healthier offerings is still being used as a lure. Kellogg has come out with a variation that has quinoa in it. Can Kale Bran be far behind?

If it’s too much trouble to get out a bowl, spoon and milk, can we count on these people when we’re no longer able to feed ourselves? Are they going to put us on protein IV drips for breakfast? That may be the same way they get their morning nutrients, but for folks who grew up listening to their Rice Crispies making snap, crackle and pop noises it’s going to be a real downer.

Convenience is a great selling point for just about anything. Internet access, cruise control, electronic bill paying, ATMs, and more have made our lives easier and more pleasurable. But the pleasure of cold milk hitting a bowl of crunchy grains and scarfing it all up while the cereal is still crunchy – that may be an indulgence that future generations (thinking about the Matrix here) never get to experience.

Sugar Pops are Tops!

(This is a Best of BoomSpeak post from some time around 2016)

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

Cash Money

Question. When you walk out the door to run errands or shop, do you grab your wallet, the car fob and some cash? It’s the cash element that I’m curious about. Are baby boomers the last proponents of paying with cash? Sure seems that way when just about everyone is tapping their credit or debit cards at the check-out counter.

An Empower survey of American attitudes toward cash, indicated that 52% of respondents said cash was king, 49% said they felt safer with cash, and 27% said they carry cash with them every day.

If you’ve been overseas lately, you may have noticed that no one there is using cash. They hold their phone near the payment terminal in their favorite cafe, it beeps and they are out the door with their coffee.

According to CapitalOne, as of March 2025, 47.8% of American adults make NO cash purchases in a typical week. More than 63% expect a cashless future and globally, point-of-sale transactions were 85% cashless in 2024.

No-cash establishments are very common in Europe so it won’t be long before we see it here in the U.S. There is no law that requires businesses to accept cash and COVID ramped up the trend to go cashless for hygienic reasons (the filthy lucre argument).

For baby boomers, the lack of control over their spending may be the biggest disadvantage to going cashless, along with the lack of privacy regarding how you’re using your money, and those pesky data breaches that keep cropping up to expose us to fraud. Sometimes you just want to buy something without anyone keeping tabs on where your money is going.

It just might be the tactile experience of handling cash that still makes it attractive to boomers. You can count it and rest assured that you have enough to pay for a movie ticket and some popcorn. You leave home with $70 and when you get back home you can count it again and know that you spent some but still have $45 remaining. It’s elemental that way but surely we won’t be able to hold out when they put a chip in our foreheads and we just need to nod to record our payment on the way out the door.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that's not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

Another Day, Another List

There are people who just sit around making lists to put online. If you don’t already know it, the point of the posts is to get you to click on as many pages as possible, thereby exposing you to a ton of ads. You knew that right? I mean you knew it after the fifth time you got suckered into going through all those pages for nothing.

Just recently, the list that caught my attention was a list of concepts that baby boomers believed in, but subsequent generations will never understand. Intrigued, I went through the list (so that you would not have to…you’re welcome).

Numero uno on the list was Having loyalty to one employer. Not I, but many boomers took a job right out of college and retired from the same company. Gen Z job hoppers give it 2 years and move on.

Number two. Owning a home. Sadly, only 21% of millennials polled believe that will ever happen for them.

Number three. Phone calls vs texting. Girlfriends and boyfriends talked on the phone for hours. You had a sore ear when you finally hung up…no speaker phone button then. A quarter of 18 to 34 year olds say they never answer the phone. They are all Gen-Text.

Number four. Hard work? Or Work-Life balance. Boomers chose the former and younger generations, particularly Gen Z are not buying into it. If their employer doesn’t allow for a balanced lifestyle, they move on.

Number five. Marriage as a life goal. Boomers paired up early and often. In many cases, too early and too often. Younger generations may be okay with being with someone for life, but marriage – not so much.

Number six. Owning a car(s) was a big deal for boomers. It was our ticket to freedom and the ability to roam. Younger gens user ride-sharing apps and many have not bothered to get a license.

Number seven. Privacy versus sharing. Boomers are rather circumspect about their private lives while later generations find it totally normal to share their innermost life details to the point where we think they are oversharing. That’s not stopping them.

But that’s not all. Buying used instead of new. Respecting authority without question. Using television as their news source. Paying with cash. You can guess which side younger gens came down on without my dissection.

No, don’t thank me for saving you the trouble of reading another list. It was my pleasure.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that's not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

Here's Looking at You Kid

 

Someone called me a whiz kid because I knew how to record a voice memo on an iPhone. He’s a few years older than me, but it got me thinking that if I qualify as a kid, maybe it was time to start to giving the “Kid” moniker to anyone younger than me.

The server at the Indian restaurant will be Kid Curry, the UPS driver will be Kid Brown, which means the other delivery guy will be Kid Fed. My coffee will be expertly brewed by Kid Barista and I’ll purchase my jeans from Kid Levi. Movie tickets will be purchased from Kid Flic and burgers from Kid Mac. Kid Firestone will rotate my tires and Kid Kroger will bag my groceries. Kid Cable will keep my TV going and with any luck, I’ll never have to watch any of the shameless shenanigans of Kid Kardashian.

When you’re a kid, you don’t want be called kid. As in, “Scram kid.” Or W. C. Field’s line, “Go away kid, ya bother me.” And being someone’s kid brother or kid sister isn’t exactly the description a young person wishes to be called.

But attitudes change and the years have mellowed my opinion about being “the kid.” Being the youngest carries no stigma anymore. On the contrary, when you put a bunch of boomers in a room, it’s quite the honor to be considered the kid.

It’s a storied tradition when you think about it. The Cisco Kid, Billy the Kid, Kid Shane, Karate Kid, Cudi the Kid, Kaitou Kid, Heartbreak Kid, Ringo Kid, Rawhide Kid, Two-Gun Kid, and who could forget the Sundance Kid. In the movie Casablanca, Rick toasts Ilsa with “Here’s looking at you kid.” That line is one of moviedom’s most famous.

A kid is young. A kid can get away with stuff. A kid has a certain joi de vivre, and who doesn’t want that? Yep, I’m liking this “kid” thing. I like being called kid, and I think I’m really going to enjoy calling younger people “kid.”

It’s a lot better than whippersnapper.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

Driving Nowhere

When we were really desperate to drive somewhere, anywhere, we would pry out the back seat of the Mercury to look for loose change. In the bowels of the strange brown matting beneath the seat we would find nickels, dimes, pennies, and every now and then, a precious quarter. It may not sound like much now, but gas was 32 cents a gallon in those days, so 50 cents bought us some quality time on the back roads of New England.

We could take the MGA out by the reservoir and watch the beams of light from the headlights bounce off the rows and rows of pine trees that made up the watershed. After midnight, with the top down, all we could hear was the roar of the wind and the purr of the motor. Long straight roads were our late night entertainment as we pushed the MG to see just how fast it could go. The speedometer hit sixty, seventy, eighty, and sometimes ninety before the lights of an oncoming car would force us to click off the high-beams and ease off the accelerator.

Other teenagers parked at “the plaza” and went from car to car, making up lies about who was having sex and who wasn’t, which “good girls” really weren’t good girls, and countless other topics of absolutely no importance that whiled away their time. We, on the other hand, had to be on the move. The whole point of having a car was to be in it, to be one with it, and to always, always keep moving. Could we make it to the border of the next state and back on less than half a tank of gas? It’s not as hard as it sounds in a region of small states, but it was about the adventure. We tested our driving skill and teenage luck.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see how invulnerable we thought we were. It never occurred to us that you might lose control of an Oldsmobile Starfire doing 110 m.p.h. out on the interstate. All we knew back then was that our instincts were telling us to get out on the highway and drive (Steppenwolf “Looking for Adventure” anyone?).

Whatever happened to driving nowhere? Four dollar per gallon gas in the 70s and three dollar gas today would be answers, but maybe computers and video games provide a vicarious (and safer) sense of escapism. Besides, cars have become so complex that we no longer understand how they operate, and where’s the romance in that?

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

Now What?

Boomers are moving into to the now what? phase.

Our bodies are, shall we say, disappointing us on a more frequent basis. One day it’s an eye infection and the next day it’s a hitch in the hip (yes, another one). What’s going on?

If you were at the car dealer for routine maintenance they would simply tell you that it’s normal part wear. That’s right. Your body is just like a car. As the mileage rolls up on the odometer, life’s wear and tear starts to add up. The problem is that you cannot replace limbs as easily as putting on new tires or just changing the oil or the mysterious cabin filter that every car service rep will tell you needs to be replaced (for $75).

If you’re counting on one hand the number of aches and pains you’ve decided you can live with, then you know exactly what we’re talking about here. Sore knee? It’s not so bad that you stop hiking. Cataracts? Stop driving at night. For every ailment there’s an excuse to keep on moving. And that’s as it should be, otherwise we would never get out of bed.

Speaking of getting out of bed…that’s when you take inventory of what will hurt today. Worse, it could be when you realize there’s a new pain that was not there when you went to bed. I hate that.

What are we supposed to do about this sensation that we’re trapped in the now what phase? In the words (and cartoons) of R. Crumb, we just need to Keep On Truckin! Facing life’s challenges unbowed, we need to sustain that forward momentum, that optimism that characterized the baby boomer generation that still lives on, navigating the troubled waters of our current social and political upheaval, so that we just KEEP ON TRUCKIN!!

Phew! Did not realize the power of those words. It won’t be easy to exchange “now what” for keep on truckin, but what other choice is there? Resilience is all we’ve got going for us and that may be just enough to get us through the hard times brought on by our physical deterioration.

No other option. We can do this.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.