The graying economy: North Carolina's aging consumers mean shifts in thinking.

• Author: Burgess, Kenneth L.
• Position: Business Guide 2014

Generation X members and Millennial stand aside, the baby boomers are coming up behind you with a pocket full of cash and some very strong ideas about services, commodities and products we want to purchase. As one of those baby boomers, people born between 1946 and 1964, I've listened for most of my professional life to marketing experts and entrepreneurs tout the market strength, spending power and economic importance of purchasers who comprise Generation X (those born between 1965 and 1980) and Generation Y or the Millennial (those born between 1980 and the early 2000s). Certainly, those generations have changed much of the American economy across the board because of the things they buy, where they buy them, how they communicate with us and we with them, their work habits, and their expectations of how a strong economy looks and what it offers to them.

But hold the presses. We baby boomers, now grandmas and grandpas and great-uncles and -aunts, want some input on North Carolina's economic future, including how it looks, what it offers and our roles in it. To all the makers of products and sellers of commodities, housing, health care and services, here is one thing you need to know about North Carolina's economy of the next 20 years: its color will be markedly gray (as in the color of baby boomer hair).

North Carolina is now the 10th largest state in the country and ranks 9th overall in the number of citizens over the age of 60. North Carolina is also one of the fastest growing states in the U.S. in the over 60 demographic, with nearly 2.4 million baby boomers still working, shopping, traveling and spending money. In 2012, one in five North Carolinians were older than 60. By 2032, that number will be one in four. In the next twenty years or so, boomers between the ages of 75 and 84 will constitute the fastest-growing segment of the state's aging population. By 2019, North Carolina will have more citizens aged 60 or older than those under 17 years of age.

In 2011, the average life expectancy of a 60-something North Carolinian was nearly 23 more years. Nearly 27% of these members of the so-called "silver economy" were still active in the workforce. North Carolina's baby boomers are more educated, have bought and sold more primary residences and vacation homes, held more jobs, married and divorced more often, relocated more frequently, and earned more money than any generation in our history. What's more, boomers are more demanding when they...