While the standard retirement age for American workers, as set by the
Social Security Administration, is currently 66 years and 2 months, Ike Baker, an employee at a McDonald’s in Dayton, Tennessee, has gone a full quarter century past that.
The hardworking host has been working at the fast-food chain for 21 years and celebrated his 92nd birthday on Nov. 30, 2019. Baker told
WTVC in Chattanooga that he continues to enjoy his work and has no intention of slowing or stopping just yet.
The nonagenarian is a fixture in the store according to his manager Sabina Kaylor, who says that time hasn’t taken away any of his ability to think and act quickly. At the fast-food restaurant, Baker is a host, greeting customers as they walk in and assisting them in placing their orders and providing additional service at their tables, if necessary.
In addition to his long career at McDonalds, Ike Baker joined the Army in 1952 at the height of the Korean War and served until 1960.
When asked about when he might consider retirement, Baker told WTVC that he intends to be working there “at least another ten years,” which would certainly make him one of the few centenarians still working. While McDonald’s hasn’t confirmed the fact, it seems highly likely that Baker is their oldest employee by a good margin.
Though Ike Baker might be a rarity now, according to the
U.S. Census Bureau, older workers like him will be far more common in the future. The number of Americans who continue to work into their 70s has risen 50 percent over the past 20 years.
The overall number remains fairly small, but many Americans are not only finding that working longer is necessary to pay for retirement but also that there are many benefits to staying on the job. As a
CDC survey of data from 1997 to 2011 showed, “Employed older adults had better health outcomes than unemployed older adults. Physically demanding occupations had the lowest risk of poor health outcomes, suggesting a stronger healthy worker effect.”
As it turns out, McDonald’s has a certain history of providing work to active elderly employees, and not just in the United States.
In Singapore, 88-year-old McDonald’s cook Ms. Goh Gwek Eng was profiled by local paper the
Straits Times, who found that she had not only survived the Japanese occupation during World War II but also helped raise 3 children, 9 grandchildren, and 13 great-grandchildren. As time went on, though, her duties as housewife became lighter. “Now that most of them are working or have their own families, the house is very quiet,” Ms. Goh said, per Straits Times.
In Prague, Czech Republic, Mr. Jindřich Kochrda spent his last decade of working life at a McDonald’s in the Eden shopping center, finally retiring at the age of 90. He told the
Prague Morning Times, “I’ve always worked, and I’m used to it.”
One of McDonald’s’ longest-serving employees, customer care assistant Oliver Grogan, of Windsor, England, has been working at the Thames Street location for 28 years. At 83 years young, Grogan is like his other elderly colleagues around the world in valuing the opportunity he has to work, stay sharp, and stay active.
As Grogan told the Windsor Observer, after team members and the store’s owner came together to celebrate his 83rd birthday, “I love working with my colleagues here, we have a lot of fun together and I look forward to coming into the restaurant each week to see both my team and customers.”
As life expectancy in the United States continues to increase, many boomers are rethinking the dream of early retirement, and not just for financial reasons. For employees of the Golden Arches in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, at least, the pleasure of a job well done seems to be ample reward.
