Tony Chimel has swapped the wrestling ring for the grocery store (Picture: WWE)
Iconic WWE ring announcer Tony Chimel is loving his life away from the wrestling ring.
The star, who was with the company for almost four decades before leaving as part of widespread releases in the pandemic, still dips his toes into the professional wrestling world as a producer for rivals All Elite Wrestling, but keeps busy with his work in a supermarket.
He said: ‘My main job now is I work at Trader Joe’s grocery store…I love that place and I love working there. I also work for AEW a couple times per month. I love working there as well.
‘That still keeps me a little bit on the wrestling scene and a little bit on the road and stuff like that. I don’t travel the way I used to which I’m very happy about because I don’t want to. I love both gigs now that I’m doing.’
While Chimel appeared on Raw and the revived ECW brand over the years, he’s best known for his work on SmackDown.
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His trademark ‘Rated R Superstar’ introduction for Hall of Famer Edge has gone down in history as one of wrestling’s most iconic calls, and he even recreated it when Edge’s wife Beth Phoenix was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2017.
Beth Phoenix brought Chimel to the Hall of Fame ceremony in 2017 (Picture: WWE)
Chimel was first hired by WWE in the 1980s, starting on just $16,000 a year, before being bumped up when he became ‘the head guy’ in charge of the ‘ring truck’.
‘When I first started, we were hired as employees. We had to go up to Stamford, Connecticut. We signed all the paperwork [and] we got hired by Titan Sports. Joey was making $20,000 a year and I was making $16,000 [in] November 1983,’ he added to the Behind The Turnbuckle podcast.
‘Then I remember a few years later when Joey got off the ring and was refereeing, I got to take over the ring truck and I was the head guy and I got to make the 20 grand.’
The former announcer is glad to have found ‘life after WWE’, particularly after spending the majority of his working life under the company’s banner.
‘I figured out there is life after WWE, because you figure I started when I was 22-years old and now I’m 60. I found a job at Trader Joe’s, which I never really knew about,’ he previously told Chris Van Vliet’s Insights podcast.
He admitted while he was only vaguely aware of the store, but his daughter said: ‘”Oh dad, that’s great. You gotta get this and get that!”‘
However, he soon started to see plenty of ‘similarities’ between his new job and the world of wrestling.
‘There’s a lot of similarities because at WWE they always wanted to put smiles on people’s faces and at Trader Joe’s all they want to do is wow the customer and make the customer feel happy,’ he said.
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