I read a story this week that stopped me mid-scroll. A Costco cashier in Arizona — a man who started collecting shopping carts in a parking lot for $5.85 an hour back in 1986 — is now a millionaire. He is 60, still working the register at $32.90 an hour, and he owns a three-bedroom house with a pool, has traveled to Europe twice, and has more than $1 million sitting in his 401(k). He told The Wall Street Journal he could retire, but doesn’t want to.
What got me wasn’t the million dollars. It was a sentence further down: Costco’s finance chief said “many thousands” of the company’s hourly workers have 401(k) balances over $1 million. Not executives. Cashiers. Cart pushers. As a 40-something office worker in Korea building toward my own passive-income future, I couldn’t help running the comparison in my head — and it left me with mixed feelings.
How a cashier becomes a millionaire
The man’s name is Tony Barzar, and his story isn’t really about luck. It’s arithmetic. When his employer moved to a 401(k) plan in 1993, he started putting a slice of every paycheck into it and simply never stopped. His pay climbed over the decades, his contributions rode along, and compound growth did the quiet work in the background for thirty years.
Here’s the part I want to underline for anyone outside the US: a 401(k) is an employer-sponsored retirement account where your contributions grow tax-deferred, and many employers add a “match” — essentially free money on top of what you save. Costco happens to be unusually generous, but the machinery itself — automatic payroll contributions, tax advantages, and money that goes to work in the market instead of sitting in cash — is standard American infrastructure. It’s the default runway that let an hourly worker land at seven figures.
The Arithmetic That Made Him a Millionaire
When I first read the story I assumed there had to be something I was missing — stock options, an inheritance, a lucky bet. There isn’t. The whole thing is one number doing its work for an unreasonably long time.
He started in 1986. That’s forty years of contributions. Here’s what forty years does, assuming an 8% annual return, which is an assumption for illustration and not a forecast:
| Monthly | For | Total put in | Ends up as |
|---|---|---|---|
| $300 | 20 years | $72,000 | $177,000 |
| $300 | 30 years | $108,000 | $447,000 |
| $300 | 40 years | $144,000 | $1,047,000 |
Read the last row slowly. $144,000 of his own money became roughly a million dollars. He didn’t need a large salary. He needed a modest amount, automatically, for four decades — and with an employer match, a good portion of even that $144,000 wasn’t his.
Now compare the rows against each other, because that comparison is the entire lesson. Going from twenty years to thirty years roughly doubles the money you put in and multiplies the result by about 2.5. Going from thirty to forty adds another decade of contributions and multiplies the result again. The last ten years do more than the first twenty combined.
That’s uncomfortable reading for someone starting in his forties, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But it also clarifies what actually matters: not the amount, not the fund selection, but how many years I’m willing to keep going.
Why that story feels far away from Korea
Reading it from Korea, my honest first reaction was a little envy. Our public pension — the National Pension — is a real safety net, and it’s actually being strengthened: in 2026 the income replacement rate rises to 43% and the contribution rate ticks up to 9.5%, on its way to 13% by 2033. But the long-run projection for future retirees sits closer to 33%, below the OECD average of around 43%. And here’s the sobering fact: Korea has the highest elderly poverty rate in the OECD. For many people, the public pension alone simply isn’t enough to retire on.
We do have the building blocks of an American-style system — personal retirement savings accounts, IRPs, and workplace retirement plans. But the culture around them is different. A large share of workplace retirement money in Korea sits in principal-guaranteed products earning very little, rather than in something like a broad stock index compounding for decades. The tax-advantaged accounts exist; they’re just underused. There is no cultural default that quietly turns a cashier into a millionaire.
His Clock Started in 1986. Mine Started Much Later.
There’s a structural reason his story is hard to reproduce in Korea, and it isn’t about effort or discipline.
An American 401(k) starts compounding on the day you’re hired. His money went into the market in 1986 and stayed there through every crash since. The traditional Korean retirement allowance works differently: it’s calculated at the end, from your final months’ salary multiplied by years of service, and it doesn’t sit in the market growing while you work. It transfers into a retirement account when you leave, and then it can be invested.
So the same forty-year career produces two very different outcomes, and the difference isn’t behaviour. It’s where the compounding clock is allowed to start. I’ve gone through that comparison properly, with the actual contribution ceilings on both sides, in my post on America’s 401(k) millionaires.
The other gap is the match. Many US employers add money to what the worker contributes; that’s uncommon in Korea. I happen to receive an employer contribution, but it’s a benefit my company chose to offer rather than something the system provides — and I’d rather say that plainly than let anyone assume Korean workers generally get it.
What I actually do about it
I’m not writing this to complain about Korea, or to romanticize the US. The American system has its own crack: the 401(k) is voluntary, so the gap between those who use it well and those who don’t is enormous, and Social Security replaces only about 40% of pre-retirement income there too. Nobody is handed a comfortable retirement.
But the Costco story reinforced something I already believe: if the system won’t automatically build the runway for me, I have to build it myself. So I do a very deliberately American thing inside my Korean accounts. Every month I move money into my pension and retirement accounts and buy a broad S&P 500 index fund — the same boring, automatic, decades-long approach that turned Tony Barzar’s paychecks into a million dollars. I’m just doing manually, by choice, what his employer did by default.
The lesson I took from a cashier in Arizona isn’t “move to America.” It’s that time, consistency, and money invested in the market — not parked in cash — are what actually do the work. That part is available to me right here. I just have to be my own 401(k).
This is not investment advice — just the honest reflection of one office worker comparing two systems and deciding to take matters into his own hands.
What’s Actually Transferable
It would be easy to read all of this as an excuse, and I want to resist that, because three parts of his story travel perfectly well across the Pacific.
He never stopped. Forty years covers 1987, 2000, 2008, 2020 — every crash people now describe as obvious in hindsight. He contributed through all of them. That isn’t an American privilege; it’s a decision available to anyone, and it’s the hardest one.
He didn’t pick anything. There is no version of this story where a cashier out-analysed Wall Street. He owned broad funds and let time do the work. Also fully available to me.
He kept it automatic and out of reach. Payroll deduction meant the money never landed in a spending account, and the retirement rules meant he couldn’t raid it in a bad year. I can reproduce both of those deliberately, and I have.
And there’s a detail I keep returning to. He’s 60, he could retire, and he still works the register. Whatever a million dollars did for him, it apparently wasn’t about escape. That reframes my own target more than any of the arithmetic above.
Questions I Get Asked
Isn’t it too late if I’m starting in my forties?
Later is genuinely worse, and the table above shows exactly how much. But the alternative to a shorter runway isn’t a better one — it’s no runway. I started in my forties. The question I ask isn’t whether I can match a forty-year saver; it’s what twenty-five years of not stopping produces.
Does Korea have anything equivalent to a 401(k)?
Partly. There are tax-advantaged pension accounts and an IRP, and I use all of them. The ceilings are considerably smaller and there’s usually no employer match, but the structure exists and most people I know don’t fill it.
Should I change jobs to find an employer that contributes?
That’s a bigger life decision than a financial one and I’m not going to advise on it. What I’d say is that an employer contribution is real compensation and is worth valuing as such when comparing offers, in the same way as salary.
What if I can’t manage $300 a month?
Then the number is smaller and the principle is identical. The table would look less dramatic and the direction wouldn’t change. Starting small and staying beats waiting until you can start properly.