On a recent Saturday, John Toppel, a retired Hewlett-Packard sales manager, did not spend his leisure time golfing or mowing the lawn. He spent it at a local electronics store extolling the virtues of HP laptop computers to customers.
He was not paid by the store or by Hewlett-Packard, for that matter. Toppel, 62, left the technology company four years ago, but he remains a volunteer cheerleader for Hewlett-Packard, one of thousands of its retirees whom the company is trying to galvanize into an auxiliary army of senior marketers, good-will ambassadors and volunteer sales people. None of them get paid. They do it, they say, because of their affection for the company.
“I feel like I have two marriages: a wonderful marriage at home for 36 years and a wonderful marriage at HP,” Toppel said. “I guess that’s now a former marriage, but I still have strong feelings for it.”
Across the United States, companies are making use of retirees as part-time or temporary workers. They are taking advantage not only of their expertise, but also of their desire to stay engaged with the world through work.
Hewlett-Packard’s twist is particularly unusual in Silicon Valley, where long-term company loyalty is as rare as pinstripe suits. People here switch jobs and companies on Internet time, chasing the latest technology developments and the chance to cash in stock options or catch initial public offerings.
But Hewlett-Packard, founded in 1939 before there even was a Silicon Valley, has tens of thousands of alumni, many of whom spent decades at the company, which is based in Palo Alto, California. Old-timers express a familial loyalty, telling stories of eating meals and drinking coffee with the founders, David Packard and William Hewlett, or receiving baby blankets from Packard’s wife, Lucile, when their children were born.
In a move that Hewlett-Packard says…