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Consider what Americans over 60 do. Five days a week, Max Gumbert drives up to the big Home Depot store in a leafy suburb on the northern edge of Silicon Valley, straps on an orange apron sagging with customer-service badges and gets to work, wrote the Los Angeles Times.

For eight hours a day, in a shift that ends at 10.30pm, the flooring specialist answers questions: hardwood or laminate? Ceramic tile or sandstone? Nylon or wool? Pergo or bamboo? Does cork absorb sound better than carpet?

But it is Gumbert's presence here on the sales floor, with his cardigan and courtly manner, that answers a crucial question perplexing demographers and policy experts: if you are 65 or above, and you're still working in the US today, what are you most likely to be doing?

Gumbert is 67, terrified of retirement and happy to go to work every day in the industry that employs more older Americans than any other: retail. Nearly 350,000 men and women aged 65 and above earn paycheques in the nation's stores.

In recent years, the question of exactly where older workers were employed has baffled people who have seen conflicting trends ripple through the nation's job sites: more older Americans say they want or need to work past traditional retirement age, but employers are still reluctant to retain or hire them. One result is that there has been little solid information about where people beyond the average retirement age of 63 work in greatest numbers, a critical issue especially now as benefits shrink and recession looms.

But statistics from the Urban Institute, a non-partisan research group based in Washington, show for the first time that people aged 65 and above and still working in the US are statistically most likely to do retail, farming or janitorial work, in that order.

In fact, the nation's stores employ more people aged 65 and above than the next two occupations combined, which worries some advocates who are trying to encourage the federal government, the country's biggest corporations and other employers to keep older workers on the payroll.

"These are not exactly the pictures of reinvention that you get in your monthly issue of Fortune, Money or AARP magazines," said Marc Freedman, author of 'Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life'. "This is a lesson in the dangers of what could happen if we don't develop a compelling human-resource strategy for an ageing society."