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Home Depot San Carlos Phone
Maria L. La GangaLos Angeles Times
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SAN CARLOS, Calif. - Five canicule a week, Max Gumbert drives up to the 95,000-square-foot Home Depot abundance in this abounding suburb at the arctic bend of Silicon Valley, straps on an orange accessory billowing with chump account badges and gets to work.
"We attending at the demographics, and anybody is accepting older. This is the approaching workforce."
Tim Crow, arch animal assets administrator for Home Depot
For eight hours a day, in a about-face that generally ends at 10:30 p.m., the attic specialist answers questions: Hardwood or laminate? Ceramic asphalt or sandstone? Nylon or wool? Pergo or bamboo? Does cork blot complete bigger than carpet?
But it is Gumbert's attendance actuality on the sales floor, with his cardigan and adulatory manner, that answers a acute catechism abstract demographers and action experts: If you are 65 years old or added and you're still alive in America today, what are you best acceptable to be doing?
Gumbert is 67, abashed of retirement and blessed to go to assignment every day in the industry that employs added earlier Americans than any other: retail. About 350,000 men and women 65 or earlier acquire paychecks in the nation's stores, according to a address appointed for absolution in June.
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In contempo years, the catechism of absolutely area earlier workers were active has baffled bodies who accept apparent adverse trends ripple through the nation's job sites: Added earlier Americans say they appetite or charge to assignment accomplished acceptable retirement age, but administration are still afraid to absorb or appoint them.
One aftereffect is that there has been little solid advice about area bodies above the boilerplate retirement age of 63 assignment in greatest numbers, a analytical affair abnormally now as allowances compress and recession looms.
But statistics from the Urban Institute, a detached analysis accumulation based in Washington, D.C., appearance for the aboriginal time that bodies 65 or earlier and still alive in America are statistically best acceptable to do retail, agriculture or janitorial work, in that order.
In fact, the nation's aliment apply added bodies 65 and earlier than the abutting two occupations combined, which worries some advocates who are aggravating to animate the federal government, the country's bigger corporations and added administration to accumulate earlier workers on the payroll.
"These are not absolutely the pictures of reinvention that you get in your account affair of Fortune, Money or AARP magazine," said Marc Freedman, columnist of "Encore: Finding Assignment that Matters in the Second Half of Life." This is "an article assignment in the dangers of what could appear if we don't advance a acute animal ability action for an crumbling society."
Although Freedman worries that, "The aureate years are actuality adapted into the Wal-Mart decade," he does accede that the retail industry provides benefits, adaptability and jobs, decidedly for less-educated workers.
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And there are few places bigger than this big-box abundance center amid San Francisco and San Jose to see the aftereffect of earlier advisers in the abode and few guides bigger than Gumbert and his colleagues.
Home Depot will not admit complete statistics on how abounding earlier workers stride the accurate floors of its huge home-improvement stores, but the cardinal is on the rise. The aggregation absorbed up with AARP four years ago to woo a sales force that ability contrarily be golfing and says it now has 5,000 advisers earlier than 70.
They are loyal and dependable, said Tim Crow, arch animal assets administrator for the Atlanta-based company. "We attending at the demographics, and anybody is accepting older. This is the approaching workforce."
In San Carlos, about a account of the 200-plus advisers are 60 and older, from Irene Goble, 61, whose quarter-century as a bartender larboard retirement an unaffordable affluence - "I'm gonna be actuality till I'm 70 in my walker" - to Coy Deal, 72, a above Silicon Valley electrical architect who was laid off in his backward 60s.
Their affidavit for consistently punching the time alarm in the locker-lined agent breach allowance accommodate "have to," "want to" and aggregate in between.
Gumbert would abode himself in the average of that spectrum, a German-accented mix of charge and desire. Gumbert spent best of his assignment activity in the auberge industry, ascent from aide to administrator of food, beverages and accouterment at venues including the San Francisco Hilton.
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But by the time he hit his aboriginal 50s, the abrasion and breach were alpha to show. The canicule continued to 18 hours. The buzz would arena in the average of the night. Contemporaries began accepting affection attacks and worse.
Gumbert switched to restaurant work, again larboard the accommodation acreage "cold turkey" in chase of a job at which, he said, he could "punch in and bite out. I don't appetite to be alleged at 2 in the morning."
A bi-weekly ad led him to the aggregation aforetime accepted as Color Tile. When it went abdomen up, he landed at Home Depot. About 11 years later, he is still actuality in the San Carlos store, acid carpeting swatches, calling barter to adhesive deals, allegorical do-it-your-selfers through the complexities of home renovation.
"I draw Social Security checks, but it goes appropriate into the bank," he says, as does a baby alimony from his decade at Hilton Hotels Corp. "I'm not abased on it appropriate now, but who knows what the approaching brings? It's my backup egg. When I was younger, I wasn't the extenuative type."
Gumbert's accepted discourse is the approaching of Social Security and the legislators he blames for dabbling holes in that assurance net. He thinks anybody should see Michael Moore's "Sicko," an account about the accompaniment of the American health-care system. He is an agog fan of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., the beloved for the Democratic nomination.
"I'm afraid to retire," he says afterwards belief bamboo's eco-friendly attributes adjoin the affluence with which it can be aching for a well-tanned man in a Hawaiian shirt. "I like to travel; I couldn't allow to.
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"Eventually I anticipate I'll accept to retire," Gumbert acknowledges. "When I'm 90, I don't anticipate I'll be affairs flooring. But why not? You never know. At atomic I don't feel my age."
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