The City Centre as an Age-Friendly Shopping Environment: A Comparative Study of Older and Younger Consumers’ Perceptions

The urban population ageing has major implications for city centres to cater for an increasing number of older consumers. To guide world cities on taking action in response to population ageing, the World Health Organization has addressed the universal features of the age-friendly city. Based on the WHO guideline, this study focuses on city centres as age-friendly shopping environments. The emphasis is on the perceptions of older consumers (focus-group participants aged 64–94) and compared them with those of younger consumers (qualitative-survey respondents aged 21–41). Using a qualitative content analysis, the study explores the content and meanings of the age-friendly city features in the context of shopping, and whether older consumers are different from younger consumers in their behaviour and perceptions. The findings show that although older and younger consumers use the shopping environment in dissimilar ways, they highlight the same characteristics in the city centre. This indicates that measures to develop the city centre friendlier to older consumers also benefit their younger counterparts, but for different reasons. It is necessary to understand this disparity in order to develop a city-centre shopping environment that is friendly for different ages.