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October 31 2013 by Borja Saldana
Jeanne Brouillet says she “enjoyed every minute of it”
Retail work may be the most common occupation in the United States, but some still find a way to stand out. One such worker is Jeanne Brouillet (pictured above) a cashier for Target in the Minneapolis area. Brouillet is 95 years old, and as local CBS outlet WCCO reported, she’s finally retiring after 45 years of service. That means that she started with Target when Lyndon Johnson was president. Brouillet started in 1968 at a Target branch in Bloomington, Minn. Five years later, she changed to a location in Edina, where she worked for the following four decades. Along with working as a cashier, she’s worked in sales and in presenting samples of Target products. On her last day she was handing out samples of cookies.
Why did she stay on the job into her tenth decade of life? “I’m a people person,” she told WCCO. And she credits her longevity to her decision to stay on the job. “If you don’t use it you lose it, so I have kept on using it and have enjoyed every minute of it.”
Such stories are a welcome respite from a labor market sometimes characterized by nastier forces like layoffs, racism and long-term unemployment, to name just a handful. Indeed, financial news website Consumerist.com said Brouillet’s story induced “warm fuzzies.”
Brouillet’s longevity is all the more impressive given that it can be tougher to get a job at Target than it can be to get accepted into Yale. It has been reported that a Target in Los Angeles received over 4,000 applications for 250 openings in 2012, which meant that just 6.25 percent of applicants would get the job (if there were no more applicants). Yale’s acceptance rate is 7.1 percent.
Of course, that’s not something that Brouillet has to worry about. Her biggest concern about ending her long career in retail? “I’ll miss the public,” she said.
