THESE days, everyone seems to want to be young. Old people are a nuisance, tolerated rather than respected by society and ridiculed by young people who think that listening to Slipknot makes them cool.

Furthermore, most retailers also seem to wish everyone is young. Look at almost any advert - you would think that elderly people didn't exist.

The over-50s are surplus to requirement in many companies and pensioners are blamed for the plight of the NHS. On the face of it, it's not a good time to be old.

However, our senior members of society are not suddenly going to disappear.

In fact, their numbers are swelling at an unprecedented rate and retailers are being slow to wake up to this.

As life expectancy continues to increase, it follows that the average age of the population is going to follow suit.

Throughout Europe, the over 50s army is growing rapidly: It is estimated that there will be 177m over 50s in Europe by 2025, 45m more than in 2000.

In the UK, the 20m over 50s of 2000 will have shot up to nearly 27m by 2025. This is a huge group of people to be left out in the cold.

Moreover, this is an increasingly rich group to be alienated. Recent research has identified a new consumer sector to join the yuppy and the dinky - say hello to woofs, our well-off older folks.

This species, with no children at home to drain their resources and mortgage payments behind them, have money burning a hole in their pockets.

They should be a retailer's dream but, if the marketing and advertising men want their money, they have a funny way of showing it. Research by market analyst Datamonitor has criticised marketers for ignoring elderly consumers.

The report says many turn a blind eye to them in the belief that they "get older consumers anyway", and they assume that brand loyalty in this segment is very high.

It states that older consumers switch brands more often than previously thought and find most marketing patronising, offensive or irrelevant.

Part of the reason for this, it suggests, is that about half of staff in advertising agencies are aged under 30. They're hardly in a position to tell their elders what to buy or tell them why they should buy it.

Datamonitor has also noticed the emergence of "youthfully spirited" older people, who like to experiment but are less financially secure than the woofs, and "self-preservationists", who have more conservative purchasing patterns.

The report's author, Piers Berezai, said the obsession with targeting younger consumers meant that mainstream advertising could ignore the elderly.

"With the growth in the over 50s segment, marketers can no longer run the risk of alienating this audience," he said.

Retailers shouldn't make the mistake of treating them all alike, either - not everyone reaches for a pipe and slippers at the end of their working lives.

It won't be long before people in retirement homes are listening to Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan as much as Beethoven and Mozart.

In Worcestershire and its surrounding areas, the need to connect with elderly people is as acute as anywhere else.

"In Worcestershire and Herefordshire, we are almost approaching the point where 50 per cent of the population is 45 or over," said Gussie Hearsey, of Age Concern Hereford and Worcester.

"In the next 10 years, that will be the percentage of those over 50.

"These are the people that buy most and have the biggest spending power and they mind most about the quality of things given to them.

"Someone has to pick up on this."

Mrs Hearsey said the average age of the population in the two counties was higher than the national average, with a lot of people moving here to retire.

"We have a lot of older people who have chosen to live in this area, and they bring their wealth to this area," she added.

"However, they aren't being respected in shops a lot of the time. Everyone should be thinking about the fact that we are getting older, and shops should be thinking about the people who come to shop in them."

So, the days of pensioners buying nothing but hairnets and dog food, as comedian Eddie Izzard once suggested they did, are almost gone.

It's a rich man's world but it's increasingly becoming an old man's world too.

Advertisers and marketers should ignore this fact at their peril.