Internet “positivity influencers” have helped raise almost $1.2m for an 88-year-old veteran who was working five days a week at a supermarket, finally allowing him to retire.
Ed Bambas, who had initially been retired from General Motors in 1999 but then lost his pension after the company went bankrupt, was manning self-service checkouts at Meijer in Brighton, Michigan, when he caught the attention of Samuel Weidenhofer, an Australian social media influencer.
According to Weidenhofer, someone commenting on one of his videos mentioned an “82-year-old” still working and helping customers.
As a result, Weidenhofer booked a flight to Michigan and, together with another influencer from Detroit named Mike McKinstry, they worked to find Bambas.
“We walked around Meijer for about two hours and we were looking for this friendly, jolly older man and we ran into Ed at the checkout and knew it was him right away,” McKinstry told Detroit’s WXYZ news.
A video of the interaction posted to TikTok and Instagram rapidly racked up millions of views, and Weidenhofer set up a GoFundMe fundraiser for Bambas.
In under 48 hours, the fundraiser broke the $1m target, and is still going – over $1.2m as of Wednesday.
In the viral video, Bambas explained that after serving in the military in the 1960s, he went to work for General Motors.
He retired from his job in 1999 and believed he would live in comfort with his wife, Joan, on his pension.
“I felt comfortable. I felt I had a stable financial footing. I owned my house,” Bambas told reporters this week at WXYZ. “We didn’t have any major worries.”
However, after General Motors’ bankruptcy filing in 2009 and the subsequent restructuring, he said he lost his pension in 2012. Shortly after that, his wife became ill.
“The thing that hurt me the most, was when my wife was really sick they took the pension and they also took the healthcare coverage.”
His wife died seven years ago, and he said, “Since then, I’ve been trying to re-establish myself”.
“Once my wife died, I didn’t have enough income to pay for this place or all the other bills I had accumulated because of my wife’s illness,” Bambas said.
He explained that he ultimately had to sell his house and return to work, first working at a hardware store and latterly at Meijer.
“It wasn’t hard for me to do it because I knew I had to do it,” Bambas said. “I’m fortunate God gave me a good enough body to be strong enough to stand there for eight, eight-and-a-half hours a day.”
In 2012, the same year Bambas lost his GM pension, the U.S. car maker regained its position as the world’s largest automaker by sales, a significant turnaround from its 2009 bankruptcy.
For Bambas, the recognition has come as a surprise. “It came out of the clear blue – I really truly mean that,” Bambas said.
The crowdfunder is still open and accumulating funds; meanwhile, according to reports, Bambas is currently unaware of the scale of the money pouring in to support him.
The Independent has contacted GM for comment.