SAN CARLOS, CALIF. — Five days a week, Max Gumbert drives up to the 95,000-square-foot Home Depot store in this leafy suburb at the northern edge of Silicon Valley, straps on an orange apron sagging with customer service badges and gets to work.
For eight hours every day, in a shift that often ends at 10:30 p.m., the flooring specialist answers questions: Hardwood or laminate? Ceramic tile or sandstone? Nylon or wool? Pergo or bamboo? Does cork absorb sound better than carpet?
But it is Gumbert's presence here on the sales floor, with his cardigan and courtly manner, that answers a crucial question perplexing demographers and policy experts: If you are 65 years old or more and you're still working in America today, what are you most likely to be doing?
Gumbert is 67, terrified of retirement and happy to go to work every day in the industry that employs more older Americans than any other: retail. Nearly 350,000 men and women 65 or older earn paychecks in the nation's stores, according to a report scheduled for release in June.
In recent years, the question of exactly where older workers were employed has baffled those who have seen conflicting trends ripple through the nation's job sites: More older Americans say they want or need to work past traditional retirement age, but employers are still reluctant to retain or hire them.
One result is that there has been little solid information about where people beyond the average retirement age of 63 work in greatest numbers, a critical issue especially now as benefits shrink and recession looms.
But statistics from the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research group based in Washington, show for the first time that those 65 or older and still working in America are statistically most likely to do retail, farming or janitorial work, in that order.
In fact, the nation's stores employ more people 65 and over than the next two occupations combined, which worries some advocates who are trying to encourage the federal government, the country's biggest corporations and other employers to keep older workers on the payroll.
"These are not exactly the pictures of reinvention that you get in your monthly issue of Fortune, Money or AARP magazine," said Marc Freedman, author of "Encore: Finding Work that Matters in the Second Half of Life." This is "an object lesson in the dangers of what could happen if we don't develop a compelling human resource strategy for an aging society."
