Grocery stores are re-evaluating long-standing senior discount programs. A report from Saving Advice shows that following the 2024–2025 holiday season, several national chains have quietly reduced or eliminated senior-specific perks, including designated discount days and automatic savings at checkout.
Rising inflation, labor and distribution costs, as well as changing consumer demographics seem to make these once long-standing discounts untenable.While such factors are consistent with broader retail cost pressures, their downstream effects on seniors—particularly those on fixed incomes—are both predictable and significant.
Largely left out of the conversation, however, is what is replacing those senior discount days.
Historically, senior grocery discounts functioned as a low-friction affordability mechanism; a modest percentage reduction, for example 5–10%, applied automatically on a specific day of the week. There’s minimal customer action involved, and the discount is simply applied at checkout. Current retail strategies increasingly replace these programs with generalized loyalty systems, many of which are digital-first. Enrollment, tracking, and redemption are now done through mobile applications or online accounts.
This is part of an overall trend moving towards individualized pricing driven by behavioral incentives.
For businesses, this makes sense. Rather than simply offering a broad-class discount, it’s far more valuable for companies to capture what exactly those seniors are buying. And with the sometimes controversial growth of digitized pricing, we may see those discounts applied not at checkout but at product selection. But that data capture comes at a cost for seniors who may struggle with technology. Elimination of senior-discounts creates a service gap between those seniors who are digitally fluent and those who aren’t. Those struggles to navigate through an app (and speaking plainly, not every app is designed with seniors in mind), may turn into a struggle to afford groceries.
We’ve said it before and it bears repeating: technology is moving fast, and it’s changing how grocery savings are delivered. Digital loyalty tools can help retailers become more efficient, more knowledgeable, and more profitable—but when savings become “app-first,” seniors may be left out through no fault of their own.The result is a new kind of affordability gap: not based on what you buy, but on whether you can navigate the system.
At PHC, we’re a fintech company—we understand why data matters. But we also believe the benefits of modernization shouldn’t require seniors to trade away basic access to savings and affordability, especially as food costs remain elevated. When new systems unintentionally exclude the people who most need relief, it’s worth calling attention to the tradeoff.
We can’t and won’t pretend to be the solution to end all senior hunger. What we can do, in partnership with participating grocery stores and pharmacies, is help independent retailers accept OTC and healthy food benefits that eligible seniors already have.
If your store hasn’t activated these benefit programs yet, reach out to us to get set up—so your customers can use the resources available to them to help mitigate today’s grocery costs.
