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| Who Are You? |
| Hundreds of people responded to our reader survey. |
| Adventures of a Middle-Aged Editor |
| GH Editor Michael Egan gets to the bottom of things in Waikiki. |
| Valentines for All |
| If you could send Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton and your favorite cat lover a Valentine, what would you say? |
| Chocolate Isn’t Good for You |
| They’ve been lying to us all these years. How sad! |
| Leslie Wilcox |
| Leslie Wilcox is interviewed by Michael Egan in this month’s cover story. |
| Live in Sin or Do it Agin? |
| Is love really better the second time around? How about the third? |
| Off the Beaten Path |
| Learn about Oahu’s secret beaches and hidden hikes. |
| Heart Check |
| The American Heart Association offers women good advice...and a great new service. |
FEATURE:
Who are You?
Compiled by GH Staff
My favorite part of Alice in Wonderland is the hookah-smoking caterpillar who demands of Alice: ‘Who are you?’ It’s a personal question, a sociological question and above all a philosophical inquiry that goes to the heart of all our beings.
It’s a question too that Generations Hawaii recently asked its readers. We received—and to be frank, it was a surprise—an unexpectedly large number of responses. Unexpected, but gratifying. The cards flowing in (some are still coming) showed us that not only does GH have a loyal readership but that most are generally well-off, educated, literate and active. They also love GH, which was the cherry on the frosting for all of us.
Our first discovery was that nearly two-thirds of our readers are women—64% to just under 36% men. The majority (83%) are 50 years old or more. Half are married, about 45% divorced and the remainder widowed. More than a third said their adult children lived with them, and nearly half are grandparents, with the majority of their grandchildren at least12 years old. Just under 21% have grandchildren 13-19, and about 18% of the grandchildren are 20 years or older.
Perhaps for these reasons a big minority of our readers, 46.5%, are still in the active labor force. Only 16 percent consider themselves fully retired. Nearly 30 percent describe themselves as self-employed (writers? artists? consultants?) and 53.4% still work for a company in some capacity.
One result is that over 40% live in households earning up to $100,000 a year and nearly 12% are worth more than that, i.e., they have incomes well above Hawaii’s average. Sixty-four percent own their homes and more than two-thirds (66.3%) have paid off their mortgages. In other words, the vast majority of our readers are affluent and still very much engaged in life, which one would expect of a magazine of interest to those living ‘the good life after fifty’ in Hawaii. People don’t come here just to watch the sun set over Waikiki. They’re here to live.
Our readers are also much better educated than the general population. Fifty-six percent hold college degrees, and they enjoy traveling: nearly 70% took at least one trip last year, and 30% did so twice or more. Thirty-eight percent went to the US mainland, about 40% to neighbor islands (Maui, Kauai and the Big Island were the most popular) with the balance flying elsewhere.
Restaurants are among the top beneficiaries of our readers’ leisure and affluence. Nearly 60 percent eat out between one and five times a month, more than one-quarter up to ten times a month, and nearly one-fifth ten times or more. About half of these spent $100-plus on their meals—in other words, a full 50% of GH’s readers spend $1000 or more each month on restaurants, or $12,000 upwards a year.
They shop a lot too: just under 59% go to the store for major purchases five times a month, 27.5% up to ten times, and a very impressive 14.3% even more than that. They spend nearly 27% of their income on clothes, 27% on household items, and19.5% on gifts. The balance is spent on furniture and ‘other.’
Automobiles were relatively high on the list, given the sizable investment required. Just under13% bought a car last year, while 18.2% said they were planning a new auto purchase soon.
GH readers are also book readers—big ones. Fifty-eight percent read as many as three books a month and nearly 21% five or more. They also spend quite a bit of time online, emailing, shopping, reading the news and making travel arrangement (approximately 70 percent). Not surprisingly, they don’t play digital games much—just under 5 percent did.
At the same time, our regulars are pretty vigorous: nearly a quarter are ‘physically active’ ten hours or more a month, 42% active between four and 10 hours/month, while fewer than 7% spend only an hour a month exercising. All this despite the fact that a quarter take at least one prescription med monthly, 26.4% take two and the same percentage five or more.
So the typical Generations Hawaii reader is female, working, affluent, educated, physically active, literate, married and has grandchildren. She owns her home outright, travels and shops a lot, loves eating out, goes on line and enjoys reading. Some time soon she’ll buy a car and a other expensive goodies.