Prophesying profits

ASDA’s decision to stock “disability aids” is nothing more than hard-nosed economic reality, says Peter White

ASDA was obviously feeling pretty pleased with itself when it recently announced its new range of “living aids” – that's the commercially acceptable term for all the gadgets that allow disabled people to do what other folk do without gadgets: get lids off jars, walk down the road, go to the loo.

“It will take the stigma out of disability,” ASDA purred, along with some of the other stores doing the same thing. An interesting point, this, since you immediately start thinking: “So who put the stigma into disability in the first place?”

After all, most of these items – wheelchairs, stuff to help you grip, urine bottles, canes to support you when you walk – have not just been invented, as far as I’m aware. They've been on the market for ages and could have been sold at any time in the past hundred years.

The fact is that two trends are at work here. First, it’s certainly easier to talk about disability now that the law has made commercial bodies think about their responsibility to disabled customers.

But more important is the fact that the demographic time bomb, talked about for so long, has finally gone off.

It has finally dawned on the stores that the place where the real money resides is among the over-60s and that although they’ll want, like everyone else, decent clothes, furniture and holidays, they’ll also want the practical things that accompany the disabilities of age; and that, given the solidarity that goes with numbers, they’ll increasingly not feel stimagated by wanting to buy them.

People will also feel less and less that they need tailored advice on what to choose. After all, no one would suggest you should drag in your literary adviser when buying a book.

At last what we’re seeing is the development of a potentially life-altering phenomenon – a change in attitude; but a change of attitude not brought about because people have got “nicer” or more instinctively liberal but the reverse: that among a very substantial section of the population, strong in numbers and rather good at getting together, disability will be the norm.

The irony that magazines and programmes for disabled people have known for some time but never dared utter is that more disabled people is a cloud with a silver lining!