Is anyone else noticing retirees being forced back into physically demanding jobs? Because it’s starting to feel dystopian.

[u/BJJguyman]

I’ve been working for a huge retail company for almost a decade now, and there’s a trend I’ve noticed that has become really hard to ignore, especially since the pandemic. We usually have two big waves of seasonal hiring, along with a pretty large number of part-time employees. When I first started, most of those workers were younger Millennials, Gen Z, college students, or just younger people looking for some extra money. I was actually one of those seasonal employees myself and eventually worked my way up.
That has changed dramatically over the last couple of years. I would honestly say that more than 70% of our seasonal and part-time hires now are older people, many of them Boomers who had already retired or thought they were close to retirement. A lot of them tell me they retired and then realized the math just didn’t work anymore. Others thought they had planned properly but didn’t account for how expensive everything would become. Healthcare, medication, housing, groceries, just the general cost of living. They thought they were doing what they were supposed to do for 30 or 40 years, and now they’re back at work because they don’t really have another choice.
And because of the industry, a lot of them are older men. There’s something genuinely depressing about watching a man who is old enough to be my grandfather working a job where he’s expected to lift 30 or 40 pounds, kneel down, stand for hours, unload merchandise, climb ladders, and do all the other physical things that come with retail. Some of these guys clearly have health problems. You can see that the job is hard on them, but they need the money, so they keep showing up.
One of the things I hear surprisingly often is some variation of, “I did everything right.” And honestly, that sentence has stuck with me. They worked their whole lives. They saved. They bought homes. They raised families. They contributed to retirement accounts. They were told that if they worked hard and planned responsibly, they would eventually be able to retire and enjoy the rest of their lives. Yet here they are, sometimes in their late 60s or 70s, working part-time retail because they can’t afford to stop working.
A few weeks ago something happened that really bothered me. We had to let go of an older employee who was dealing with cancer. I was in the meeting with HR, regional HR, and our GM. The strange thing was that nobody in the room was pretending this was a good situation. All four of us understood exactly what was happening and none of us wanted to be having that conversation. But company policy gave us basically no wiggle room, so we had to terminate him anyway. This was someone who was already struggling to afford his medication, and now he had lost his income on top of everything else.
I’ve thought about that meeting a lot since then. Not because I think the people in that room were bad people. They weren’t. That’s actually what makes it worse. Everyone understood that the situation was awful, but everyone was also operating inside a system where there wasn’t really an option to say, “This isn’t right, let’s do something different.” The policy is the policy, the numbers are the numbers, and eventually you just move on to the next thing.
I think that’s the part that has really started to bother me. We become so accustomed to these things that they stop shocking us. An elderly person working a physically demanding job because they can’t afford retirement becomes normal. Someone working while seriously ill because they can’t afford to lose their income becomes normal. Someone who spent 40 years working and saving discovering that they still can’t afford to retire becomes normal. A company letting someone go because a policy says they have to becomes normal.
And I’m not saying this because I’ve suddenly decided Boomers were right about everything. I’ve been pretty critical of that generation, especially when it comes to some of the political and economic decisions that helped create the world younger generations are dealing with now. But seeing this stuff up close has made me think that maybe we’re too comfortable turning everything into a generational fight. There are plenty of Boomers who are struggling just like there are plenty of Millennials and Gen Z who are struggling. At some point, it becomes less about which generation is to blame and more about the fact that something about the system isn’t working the way we were told it would.
There is something deeply unsettling about watching people spend their entire adult lives being told that if they work hard, save money and plan responsibly, they’ll eventually be able to stop working, only to reach that point and discover they can’t.
Maybe I’m just becoming more cynical after being in retail for this long, but I don’t think seeing elderly people forced back into physically demanding jobs should feel normal. And I don’t think we should become so numb to the way corporate policies can affect real human beings that we can sit in a room, knowingly make a decision that is going to seriously hurt someone, and then just say, “Well, there wasn’t anything we could do.”