- Baby boomers, my cohorts, comprise 33 percent of the population. Specifically—the third with both disposable income and free time.
- That’s 81 million people—78 million native Americans born between 1946 and 1964, plus three million immigrants of the same age.
- This group is pouring billions of dollars into mutual funds and real estate investment. Presumably we’ll start cashing out when we begin to reach retirement age around 2010. Presumably the bull markets will begin to level out then, but the last of the boomers won’t start liquidating capital until around 2028.
- This gives the ski business between 13 and 31 years to milk the boom—to sell the boomers lift tickets, hamburgers, booze and retirement property.
We’re low-risk customers. With nothing left to prove (and nothing left to prove it with) we take fewer sled rides than 20-something crazies. Except for the lawyers among us, we behave nicely and don’t alienate other guests. We bring our spouses, so we don’t compete with the ski instructors at the aprés-ski meat market. We’re quiet drunks.
At age 48, I’m a boomer. So are most of the folks reading this. The more I hear about boomer demographics—age, income, family situation, mindset, habits, prejudices, frailties and fate—the more familiar that guy looks. I see him every morning in the mirror.
I can’t be any more blunt about the issue than this: the ski industry should be marketing to me. As a male boomer, I’m your prime customer—and always have been. My wife, a female boomer, is a very good skier, but she has a much shakier commitment to sport as lifestyle.
Let’s be up front about one thing: boomers are self-involved, egocentric adolescents. Our elders have always known it and the Gen X kids figured it out pretty early on. Gen-Xers—including the snowboarders among them—hate us precisely because we’ve always been so self-involved that we never noticed them. Market to Gen X? Why bother?
We may be parents and conservative on issues that affect our kids, but that inner adolescent still responds to rock and roll messages. We don’t do drugs anymore, but we’re secretly proud that we did. We still believe that the world of 1970 needed to be changed and that trying to change it wasn’t such a bad idea. Going skiing was a good idea.
Skiing is about the most self-involved sport known to civilized humanity. It’s all about sensation, satisfaction, meeting your own needs. The recreational skier doesn’t have to measure up to any objective standard. If a turn feels right, it is right. (This is a big reason boomers stay away from ski schools…in droves.)
So skiing is the perfect sport for us. And right down to the bottom of my soles, I still love to ski more than anything else. But family life seems to get in the way.
Self-involved we may be, but we’re also sensitive guys. We’re weenies. We want our wives to be happy. I’ll ski more often if my wife and daughter want to ski more often. It’s often said that you’re as old as you feel, but it’s been my experience that you’re as old as your spouse feels. If my wife feels frisky, so do I. If she feels fatigued, hassled, overworked or overwrought, then we’re not going out of the house. If my kids are happy, then my wife is happy and then I’m happy.
My definition of a trophy wife: she’s the first to jump the cornice. She wants to go to Blue River next spring and do a husband-and-wife figure-eight thing.
It’s not going to happen unless we get to ski together this fall.
Proposal One: Fix Ski School Schedules
Family skiing is a hassle, by which I mean that it eliminates powder skiing. When my wife and I were more agile, we found it easy to roll into the ski area parking lot an hour before the lifts opened. We could meet friends for coffee and bagels, read the newspapers and still be at the top when the patrol dropped the rope.
Small kids don’t necessarily move at this pace. Even if they can be dressed, breakfasted and loaded into the car quickly, they must still be checked into ski school. But ski school schedules are, for the most part, still set up for the convenience of ski school managers, not for the convenience of customers. At most resorts, you don’t get first tracks if young Fester can’t be abandoned to the ski school apprentices until after 9:30 a.m. And, if classes don’t start until 10:00 a.m., kids shouldn’t be required to marshal 15 minutes early in the howling wind.
Another problem: at least one parent must quit skiing at 3:00 p.m. when ski school ends. This directly affects my perception of the value of the day pass. I used to ski from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.— eight hours on a $24 pass. Now, if I get $30 discount tickets for the wife and self and spend $45 apiece for two kids in ski school, I’m laying out $150 for five hours of freedom. Hey, that means the hourly rate has gone up exactly 1000 percent. Don’t tell me that the price of skiing has risen less than three percent per year. And powder tracks are unattainable at any price.
What You Can Do: Get me on the mountain earlier. Steamboat does a good job here. At 8:00 a.m. I can drive right up to the door of the ski school and send the kid indoors to be entertained by a clown until it’s time to ski. By that time, the wife and I can be hiking over the top of Storm Peak. By 3:30 p.m. we’re happily exhausted and only too ready to retrieve our darling. And the $200 we dropped on tickets and lessons are worth every dime.
In case you missed it, here are the critical points:
1) Ski school classes should marshal indoors.
2) Daddy and Mommy mustn’t be asked to drag equipment uphill from a parking lot.
3) Daddy gets cranky if he’s not at the front of the lift line when conditions warrant.
Proposal Two: Hook My Kid on Powder
With a powder-hound kid in the family, I’d have no trouble motivating the crew early in the morning. I’d have a partner in crime. I’d have someone to break trail for me in my old age. Everyone should plan for retirement. You do it your way, I’ll do it mine.
Ski school probably can’t help with this. Powder is not a dependable commodity on lift-served terrain, nor are most ski school personnel equipped to teach powder skiing to 60-pound clients on narrow 140-cm skis.
What You Can Do: Pioneer family snowcat skiing. Twist some arms at Rossignol and Salomon—get them to build fat skis for kids. I’d pay a couple of days’ wages if you’d haul my family to the top of some gentle, safe aspen glade and addict my kid. If she’s too young to ski the powder, let her ride up front with the cat driver and his labrador—she’d love it.
Proposal Three: Fix the Schlep
When we were single and still motivated largely by testosterone, we loved driving on slick, twisting mountain roads. Now we hate it. Mainly, we hate driving in traffic with the back seat full of whining kids. We’re not about to give up the Explorer in favor of riding a bus or train—we shudder at the logistics involved in dragging kids and their gear onto public transportation. But if I’m buying a $100 worth of lift tickets, I think I’m entitled to park in a close-in HOV lot with ski hosts in attendance to help schlep. I’m happy to tip cheerful, helpful personnel. The only parking attendants I see at most resorts are there to stack sports utility vehicles on top of each other.
What You Can Do: Rope off an HOV lot next to the base lodge. Encourage high school and college kids to work the lot from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. in return for a day pass and tips. Use this group of caddies as a candidate pool when hiring hosts and entry-level instructors. For starters, we’ll send you our own teenagers. They can work and ski through spring break while we take our wives to British Columbia.
Seth Masia still believes that only sex sells skiing. He no longer works in the ski business, but answers e-mail addressed to [email protected].
