Cosby ShowActor Geoffrey Owens Still 'Struggles Every Day' to 'Make Ends Meet' After Quitting Trader Joe's

Mar. 15, 2025

Geoffrey Owens.Photo:Paras Griffin/Getty

Paras Griffin/Getty

Geoffrey Owensis sharing an update on his life.

“I struggle every day to make my ends meet,” he said. “And people can’t get their heads around that because they see me in movies, whether it’sMr. Santaor I’m onPoppa’s Houseon CBS right now. People have the impression that, ‘You’re making a lot of money. What’s the problem? Why would you have financial troubles?’ They don’t understand the specifics of how my industry works.”

“I’m grateful for the work I have,” he later added. “I work more than a lot of people do, so I got to keep perspective.”

Geoffrey Owens.Nathan Congleton/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty

Nathan Congleton/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty

After he was photographed at the New Jersey Trader Joe’s, Owens, 63, said he was grateful for the support he received from the public, but he ended up having to leave the cashier job for privacy reasons.

“It was strange because someone had been in the store taking pictures,” he explained. “And I was like, now that this is breaking, I’m not going to feel comfortable working in this store wondering who is around with a camera. It would just be too weird. I’m a very private person.”

“It wasn’t like I quit knowing I would be making a lot of money soon or anything,” he added. “I just felt like I wasn’t going to be able to handle that kind of scrutiny and attack on my privacy.”

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Geoffrey Owens.Kristina Bumphrey/Variety via Getty

Kristina Bumphrey/Variety via Getty

“At the time it seemed like the right thing to do,” he said on the radio show. “If Nikki Minaj had hired me, okay, she had paid me $25,000 to do something, I would have said, ‘Thank you for the work.’”

Since then, Owens shared that he has gone back to Trader Joe’s “to ask for hours to work there again” despite the “job-shaming” he experienced in 2018.

“I did maybe 20 percent of the show,” he noted. “People have a false you impression of what the average middle-class actor makes and their ability to make a living in the industry. That’s what drove me to work at Trader Joe’s to begin with.”

source: people.com