By Leonardo Blair, Senior Reporter Wednesday, March 25, 2026

Richard Pulley, a 78-year-old Tennessee man forced out of retirement to work 12-hour days as a DoorDash delivery driver to help cover his family’s expenses after his wife lost her job, has received a check for nearly $1 million in donations from over 30,000 people to help him retire.

The money, which he received last Friday, was raised through a GoFundMe campaign launched by Brittany Smith, who recorded him in a now viral video making a Starbucks delivery to her home in Manchester, Tennessee.

“He is precious, and he is not working because he wants to; he's working because he has to,” Smith said in a post with the video of Pulley’s delivery she shared on Facebook on March 10. She questioned why Pulley had to use DoorDash at his age and asked the public to help her find him.

Some 10 days later, and after millions of views on the video and GoFundMe donations, Pulley is now on his way to retire with his wife, Brenda, with plans to buy a new house, according to WKRN.

“I’ve had so many people say, well, it was only $10, but it was so much more than that because that might have been their last $10, and we don’t know that,” Smith said of the donors. “But they gave it to make sure that Richard had a chance at retiring, so.”

Smith told the news outlet that she is really happy with the way people around the world stepped up to help Pulley.

“It really just shows his generation because here he is just trying to make sure his family is taken care of,” Smith said. “Ya know, him and his wife. He was doing it for her because he wanted to make sure that she had the medication that she needed to keep her off dialysis.”

A couple of days after she shared the video of Pulley’s delivery, Smith called him and his wife her “adopted grandparents.”

Pulley had been working with DoorDash for about a year and a half when his delivery went viral. The company said Pulley completed more than 6,000 deliveries during his time with them and donated some $20,000 to his GoFundMe campaign, according to News Channel 9.

While he plans to retire with the donations, Pulley told WKRN that he still plans on working from time to time.

“It kept me working, and I need to keep myself moving. All the people have been good, and Ms. Smith has been good to me, and DoorDash has been very good to me,” Pulley said.

“So if a wife has a husband who’s not working, sign him up for DoorDash,” he said. “He’ll learn how to work.”

News Source : https://www.christianpost.com/news/doordash-delivery-worker-78-gets-nearly-1m-from-strangers.html