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Vet working at Detroit grocery store can ‘retire with dignity’ after $1.8M in donations

December 6, 2025 | | Print Article

An 88-year-old Michigan veteran who works as a grocery store cashier burst into tears this week when an influencer presented him with a $1.77 million check from the public.

“Thank you … oh my God,” veteran Ed Bambas said after receiving the check. “I wish my wife were here, but it’s something that dreams are made out of, trust me, from my beginnings to here.”

As previously reported, Bambas retired from General Motors (GM) in 1999 with the expectation that he was set for the remainder of his life.

“I felt comfortable,” he told Detroit station WXYZ. “I felt I had a stable financial footing. I owned my house. We didn’t have any major worries.”

By “we,” he meant his wife, Joan, with whom he had two children.

But all that changed after General Motors (GM) fell into bankruptcy in 2009, and Bambas was stripped of his pension and retirement benefits.

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Things soon got even worse.

“Then his wife became ill, and Bambas became her full-time caretaker,” according to WXYZ. “She died 7 years ago, but the long illness accumulated significant medical bills.”

That’s when Bambas had to go back to work.

“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,” he explained to the station.

So he returned to work, first at Ace Hardware, and then later as a cashier at Meijer.

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“It wasn’t hard for me to do it because I knew I had to do it,” he 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.”

Earlier this month, Bambas’ story managed to go viral and attract the attention of Australian influencer Samuel Weidenhofer, who subsequently traveled all the way to Michigan to find him with the help of local influencer Mike McKinstry.

“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 recalled to WXYZ.

A video the two influencers recorded with Bambas, seen above, has since gone massively viral. In the video, Bambas described the pain of his wife becoming sick and him losing his pension.

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“The thing that hurt me the most was when my wife was really sick,” he said. “And when they took the pension, they also took the healthcare coverage and all but $10,000 of my life insurance. So I sold my house, sold the property I had, and we made it through.”

After meeting Bambas, Weidenhofer decided to launch a GoFundMe fundraiser to raise money for the old timer’s permanent, final retirement.

The GoFundMe quickly exploded and was in fact over $1.8 million by Saturday morning, hours after Bambas had been presented with a check.

“I just wanted to give him a chance to retire, you know?” Weidenhofer told WXYZ. “At least have some comfort. At first, I thought maybe there would be a little bit of support, but to see how much? It’s record-breaking.”

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Weidenhofer previously told the New York Post that he learned about Bambas from a follower who told him about his situation.

“All I knew was that he was a man in his 80s and he was working at the grocery store,” the influencer said. “I didn’t know he was struggling. I just wanted to highlight how amazing he was for working at that age. I never thought this would happen.”

Vivek Saxena
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