Thousands of people have donated about a quarter of a million dollars to a 90-year-old US air force veteran who has been financially supporting himself by pushing shopping carts at a grocery store in sweltering Louisiana – and now has the option of retiring if he wants thanks to the strangers’ generosity.
The story centers on Dillon McCormick, who is among a growing number of Americans to extend their working careers well past the average retirement age as the cost of living in the US has soared and most employees’ wages have stagnated over the years, preventing many from being able to save.
McCormick was working his job as a cart pusher at a Winn-Dixie grocery store in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie on the Memorial Day holiday of 27 May – in temperatures of 90F (32C) that felt like 103F (39C) – when he caught the eye of a former local television news anchor, Karen Swensen Ronquillo.
“I said, ‘It’s Memorial Day, and you’re out here working,’ and I said, ‘May I ask why?’” Ronquillo later told the CBS Mornings reporter David Begnaud for a piece set to publish Monday. “And [he] had two words: ‘To eat.’”
In separate remarks on a GoFundMe page that she set up for his benefit, Ronquillo wrote that she learned McCormick’s living expenses cost him about $2,500 monthly – yet the nonagenarian only receives $1,100 from social security. So, to make up the difference, he got a job at Winn-Dixie – pushing or pulling carts “sometimes more than 20 at a time … through [a] maze of cars” in the store parking lot, as Ronquillo noted on GoFundMe.
“He pushes carts for HOURS,” Ronquillo added. “I met regular shoppers who say they see him doing this ‘all the time’. Some, like a 73-year-old man with a limp, get out to help him. Many do double takes.”
Ronquillo went home that day and launched a GoFundMe campaign meant to inform internet users of McCormick’s plight as well as to raise enough money to give him the option of retiring. The online campaign was soon circulated widely and by Friday evening, about 5,400 donors had contributed more than $233,000.
“Should he choose to remain working, it will be just that – his choice,” Ronquillo wrote of McCormick in an update on the page for the fundraiser. “No longer will the 90-year-old veteran have to push shopping carts in triple digit heat to put food on his table. He won’t have to walk to work (should he choose to remain); he can (rideshare) instead, or buy a car.
“He will live out his days in comfort and security.”
In comments to CBS, McCormick described himself as fortunate to have encountered Ronquillo, who worked at New Orleans’ CBS affiliate WWL from 1993 to 2022.
“There’s very few people like her left in this crazy world of ours,” McCormick said. “But as long as she’s alive, people are in good shape.”
However, despite the heartwarming way his community rallied around him, McCormick’s story illustrates harsh economic realities in the US.
Longer lifespans like McCormick’s – and that of his mother, who reportedly died at age 104 – have combined with slashed social security benefits to drive an increase in the average US retirement age, according to experts.
The director of Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research, Alicia Munnell, previously told Forbes that American women and men on average were retiring at 59 and 62, respectively, in 1992. By 2021, those ages had respectively gone up to 62 and 65, according to Munnell.
