‘Cosby Show’ Actor Geoffrey Owens Is Now Bagging Groceries At Trader Joe’s

The Cosby Show aired for eight seasons on NBC from 1984 to 1992 much to the delight of its legions of fans. The award-winning sitcom was notable for featuring TV’s first upper middle-class African-American family as its main characters.

Most of the series’ stars continued to make waves in the entertainment industry following the show’s cancellation. Everyone knows what series patriarch Bill Cosby, aka Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, is currently up to after all of the sexual assault accusations that were made against him. Phylicia Rashad, matriarch Clair Huxtable, spends a great deal of her time acting on Broadway and is also Mary Anne Creed in the 2015 blockbuster film Creed and its upcoming sequel, Creed II.

As for the Huxtable children, Theo’s portrayer, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, was promoted from recurring to series regular for the upcoming second season of Fox’s The Resident; Keshia Knight Pulliam, Rudy, caused quite a stir in the Celebrity Big Brother house earlier this year; and Sabrina Le Beauf (Sondra), Lisa Bonet (Denise), and Tempestt Bledsoe (Vanessa) also continue to act. Even Bonet’s on-screen stepdaughter, Raven-Symoné (Olivia Kendall), who appeared on the show when she was just 3-years-old, is still working — she was a co-host on The View from 2015 to 2016, and now appears on the Disney Channel’s Raven’s Home, which has aired two seasons so far.

But whatever happened to Sondra’s meek husband Elvin Tibideaux, played by Geoffrey Owens?

One customer found him while she was shopping at a Trader Joe’s in Clifton, New Jersey — he was working as a cashier.

Karma Lawrence noticed Owens at the grocery store on Saturday, August 25, around 7:30 p.m., while shopping with her wife. She snapped some photos and then told her story to the Daily Mail.

'Cosby Show' actor Geoffrey Owens spotted bagging groceries at NJ Trader Joe's https://t.co/bhkxWYa9gq

— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 31, 2018

In the pictures published online, the 57-year-old is wearing a stained, gray Trader Joe’s T-shirt, and has a company ID badge on that states his first name. He is a bit overweight and has a full, gray beard.

“I have never seen him at Trader Joe’s before,” Lawrence told the Daily Mail.

“I would have thought after the Cosby Show he would, maybe, be doing something different. It was a shock to see him working there, and looking the way he did. It made me feel really bad. I was like, ‘Wow, all those years of doing the show and you ended up as a cashier.'”

Workers at Trader Joe’s reportedly make around $11 an hour.

After the Cosby Show went off the air, Owens, who reportedly lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his mother, did manage to secure sporadic acting roles, including some Broadway and off-Broadway theater productions. According to his IMDB profile, in 2017, he appeared in episodes of Blue Bloods, Lucifer, The Blacklist, and Greenport. This year, he was in an episode of the show Elementary and shot roles for the films Hibiscus, Fizzle, and Impossible Monsters.

Radar Online contacted Owens but said, “he slammed down the phone” when asked about Trader Joe’s. However, he phoned the site the following day to talk about his recent acting gigs and to explain that he also teaches a Shakespearean acting class in New York City.

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