Record numbers of over-65s are in employment. We need to address how they are treated at work by managers, colleagues and customers
Last week, when out shopping, I saw something that made me pause. At the supermarket, the cashier was an older man, probably early seventies. The next day, the same again in Marks & Spencer.
What struck me wasn’t their presence – older workers are everywhere now – but their pace. At M&S, after serving a customer, he straightened the bags with careful precision, adjusted his water bottle, wiped the scanner, and only then started serving me. Each movement was deliberate. At the supermarket, the man turned products slowly to find barcodes, seemed to read each label, then gently placed items down. The customer behind me and I exchanged a small, knowing glance: we were waiting longer than expected.
This wasn’t a complaint. It was recognition. A glimpse of how everyday life is shifting as more older adults remain in, or return to, the workforce.
I’m 68. When I watch these men working, I see my own future, or perhaps my present. I notice things about myself now that I didn’t five years ago. My fingers don’t always co-operate with touch screens the way they used to. Using Apple Pay requires a moment of concentration that it never did before. It’s not that I can’t do it, I can. It just takes a fraction longer, and requires a bit more mental energy.
Last month, a friend my age mentioned she’d been “performance managed” out of her retail job. “They said I wasn’t meeting targets,” she told me over coffee, her voice tight. “But the targets were the same for the 25-year-olds. I was doing everything right, just not fast enough.” She’d worked there for six years. Now she’s piecing together part-time hours at two different places, both paying less.
Another woman I know, 72, still works part-time in a café. “I love the routine,” she tells me. “But the new coffee machine? It has about fifteen buttons and they all look the same to me. The young ones just know. I have to think about it every time.” She’s terrified they’ll upgrade to something even more complicated.
Queues will be longer, transactions will take more time
Britain is deep into a demographic transition. The number of workers aged 65 and over has nearly tripled since 2000, from 457,000 to 1.43 million today. More than one in nine people now work past their 65th birthday.
With labour shortages acute – the hospitality sector alone has 121,000 vacancies – older adults are encouraged, often required, to keep working into their late sixties and seventies. Some work for purpose or routine. Many work because they cannot afford not to.
Yet the push for longer working lives rarely comes with an honest conversation about what ageing means for day-to-day performance in frontline jobs, and the nation’s productivity.
If Britain is serious about extending working lives, it must also be serious about what that means in practice: queues will be longer, transactions will take more time, customer impatience may rise, and performance metrics will need rethinking. Job design must stop assuming speed is the primary marker of value.
I gained my doctorate at 64, researching how people find meaning after full-time work. What my research participants rarely acknowledged, and what I see now in myself, is how the body’s gradual changes affect the work itself. Reaction times lengthen. Vision shifts. Hearing becomes more selective. Stamina ebbs more quickly across a shift. Fingers stiffen slightly, making repetitive tasks like scanning just that bit slower.
None of this reflects effort or attitude. It is biology. And it shapes the pace of work in ways we’re only beginning to see, not only in customer-facing roles but in many forms of everyday employment.
‘It takes me longer, but I’ve never made a mistake’
I’m a coach, and one of my clients, a man of 67, described his last shift at a call centre. “I could handle the calls fine, customers liked talking to me, I was good at calming people down. But the system kept timing out while I was typing notes. I’m just slower on the keyboard than I used to be. They told me I needed to ‘improve efficiency.’” He’s now looking for work again, unsure what he’s qualified for at his age.
Another client, a woman of 70, works in a pharmacy. She told me she re-reads prescriptions twice now, confirms names carefully, checks labels multiple times. “It takes me longer than the younger staff,” she admitted. “But I’ve never made a mistake. They have.” Customers shuffle impatiently, unaware that these moments are safety rather than delay.
These changes creep up so gradually we barely notice. We don’t see ourselves slowing because it happens incrementally. Colleagues who see us daily don’t notice either. It’s the stranger in the queue who sees the difference.
Older workers are, and will continue to be, an asset to employers. Their experience, judgement, and steadiness matter. But if we want to retain them, we also need to address how they are treated at work, by managers, colleagues, and customers alike, and how workplace cultures can unintentionally make people feel they no longer belong.
We cannot rebuild our workforce without reshaping expectations around it.
The need for speed
Britain loves the glossy narrative of “silver workers” and “70 is the new 50”. But not everyone working past 65 is there by choice. Recent research reveals women are 25 per cent more likely to be forced to work beyond retirement age compared to men. Workers in routine manual occupations are 67 per cent more likely to be working out of necessity.
The man scanning my groceries slowly? From the outside, I cannot tell whether he’s there for social contact and purpose, or because his pension won’t cover rising costs. Both realities exist side by side.
Many people in customer-facing roles are working well into their late sixties and seventies, in environments designed around one assumption: speed.
During my research, older workers told me what would make the difference. Not complicated interventions, just thoughtful adjustments.
Technology that doesn’t change every few months. One woman said: “Every time they update the till system, I have to learn it all over again. It’s exhausting.”
They also need time to learn new systems properly. A man told me: “They gave us 20 minutes of training on the new card machine. Twenty minutes! Then we’re expected to use it perfectly during the Saturday rush.”
Performance metrics that value accuracy as much as speed. Managers who understand that concentration fatigue is real. “By hour six, I’m mentally exhausted in ways I wasn’t when I was younger,” a retail worker admitted. “I need proper breaks.”
‘I’m not ready to be invisible’
Not everyone can keep up. Some older adults can no longer stand for long stretches, lift boxes, or adapt to constantly shifting systems. It isn’t unwillingness, it’s the natural reality of ageing.
Yet who decides when someone can no longer keep pace? Employers avoid the conversation. Families skirt around it. Individuals carry on because work often provides the last familiar structure holding everything together, not just income, but purpose, identity, and a reason to matter.
A client of mine, 71, recently said something that stayed with me: “I know I’m slower now. But work is the only place where people still need me. If I stop, what am I?” She started crying. “I’m not ready to be invisible.”
Today’s older workforce is healthier than previous generations. But many experience “early ageing”, fatigue, pain, or reduced stamina arriving sooner than expected.
Many older shoppers appreciate slower service. They welcome the eye contact, the brief conversation, the sense of being seen. An older customer told me recently, “I prefer the older staff. They actually talk to me like a person, not just a transaction”.
For them, this shift feels reassuring, a return to a more human pace. And for those who prefer speed, self-checkout exists. The friction arises only when we expect all workers, regardless of age, to maintain identical tempo in environments increasingly designed around urgency.
As I stood waiting at those tills last week, not irritated, but attentive, it struck me that I was watching a future already unfolding. A future where the person serving you may be 75. Britain is ageing, and our workplaces will age with us.
We will need to rethink what good service looks like. We will need to adjust our expectations of speed. We will need a more truthful national conversation about ageing – one that recognises contribution, acknowledges limits, and designs work that honours both.
Because if we want people to work longer, we cannot pretend that nothing changes. The queues are already telling us otherwise.
