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The route

Michael Biscuso started working in 1975. He was 20 years old.

His first store was at Country Club and Main. In 1976 he moved to Robinwood and Broad, in Whitehall. In 1998 he moved again, to Maplewood and Broad, also in Whitehall. He is still there.

Three addresses in fifty-one years. Two of them a few blocks apart.

The department

He works in dairy. And when you ask him about his job, the first thing he does is talk about somebody else.

«I have a head dairy named Miss Lavinia that is the best,» he says, referring to Lavinia Williams. «She does all the thinking, and then she’s so smart, she makes the dairy department correct by her use of a computer named Zebra.»

He adds that Williams is doing the work of two people, and that this leaves him a moment to — in his own words — goof off and talk.

It is the kind of answer that tells you more about the person giving it than about the person receiving it. You ask him about himself and he hands the credit to her.

The question

Staying half a century with the same employer is extraordinary in the United States, and there is an official number that measures it.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median tenure of an American wage and salary worker with their current employer was 3.9 years in January 2024, the lowest figure since January 2002. Among workers aged 55 to 64, the group with the longest tenure, the median was 9.6 years. In service occupations, where much grocery employment sits, the numbers fall further still.

Michael Biscuso’s 51 years amount to thirteen times the national median. And more than five times the median for his own age group.

So the question had to be asked: what is the secret.

His answer says nothing about salary, benefits, or a promotion.

«The same secret that you would have if you want to be a success in life is faith,» he answers. «You have to have faith.»

He credits God, Jesus, Mary and Joseph with the way things worked out for him, and mentions the cross he carries as part of that explanation.

The second half of the answer

After faith comes practical advice, delivered with a grin.

«If you’re at work and the boss says something that you don’t like, or if you’re home and the boss says something that you don’t like, if you don’t say anything, they will think you are a smart person,» he explains. «But if you say something, you’re going to be in deep trouble at work and home.»

The joke about the two bosses — the one at the store and the one at home — is his, not the writer’s.

The lines he carries

Over the course of the conversation, without being asked, four ideas come up. Biscuso delivers them like a man reciting something he has used many times:

That the two biggest powers a person has are the power of prayer and the power of choice.

That you should live simply so other people can simply live.

That you should wish good on everyone.

And that you should count your blessings daily.

None of them is original. All of them circulate in sermons, on wall calendars and in greeting cards. The difference is that this man has shown up for the same shift for fifty-one years, and that turns a calendar line into something else: a method somebody field-tested for half a century.

The family

The last question was about his family. The answer closed the conversation in the best possible way.

«My family’s Italian,» he said. «My family’s Italian, and if you have any spaghetti, pizza, or submarine sandwiches or salads, I can prove it.»

Why this story

There is a Kroger in Whitehall where thousands of people walk in every week to buy milk without knowing that the man in the dairy aisle has been there longer than many of the buildings on the block.

The Hispanic community in Columbus understands what it means to hold down a job for years without anyone noticing. That is worth pausing on when somebody reaches fifty-one years in the same place, gets asked how he did it, and starts by praising his department manager instead of talking about himself.

The photograph

When it came time for the portrait, Michael Biscuso did not want to appear alone.

He asked Lavinia Williams to join him — his dairy manager, the same woman he had been talking about twenty minutes earlier. The one who, in his words, does all the thinking and keeps the department correct with a computer named Zebra. The one who, he said, is doing the work of two people.

They posed with their arms around each other in front of the frozen food cases, both of them laughing.

There is not much to add. Ask him about his job and he talks about her. Ask him for a picture and he calls her over to be in it. Fifty-one years in one place can be explained a lot of ways, but that is probably the shortest one.

If you are ever at the Kroger on Maplewood and Broad, now you know who to say hello to. Both of them.

Source: interview with Michael Biscuso conducted September 6, 2026, in Whitehall; job-tenure data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 2024.