It would have been exceedingly easy for the NY Times to do research to get us some numbers. Instead we get this handwavy quote.
And this statement doesn’t invoke a lot of confidence for me. The article talks about profit-sharing for salespeople, then this quote says “most” retired with a “good” pension. So there were some that didn’t retire with a good pension? Who were they?
And then the quote ends with “most” are “comfortable”. Comfortable is quite different than the prior part about profit-sharing and retiring with the equivalent of a million dollars today.
That quote is just so exceedingly vague it doesn’t answer the question that The NY Times itself poses.