Pay It Forward IRL

Bit of an embarrassing situation tonight…

I was doing a (very) late night grocery run to stock up supplies for our babysitters tomorrow night.

We’d been out with the kids all day and juggling my debit card between the two of us – so of course it wasn’t in my wallet when I reached the checkout.

While I was on the phone with my wife frantically trying to add the card to Google Pay so I could tap with my phone… A couple came along and without a single hesitation, paid for my groceries, and said “just pay it forward to someone else”.

They wouldn’t accept anything I could offer – they wouldn’t even let me transfer it back to them.

They indicated that they had their reasons, and were both clearly very comfortable with the deed they’d just performed.

I had to take a serious minute to think about what just happened.

It was a pretty big grocery shop, not a small amount of money but I honestly don’t think the amount mattered to them.

Not in a money-is-no-object way, but more like, this is the deed were choosing to do tonight, and it is what it is.

I’ll definitely be paying it forward.

And just quietly, while I don’t feel like I was the right person to be on the receiving end of that amount of generosity (I’m sure a lot of people needed groceries tonight more than I did), I’m pretty buzzed that the Pay it Forward movement is real, and I’m now a part of it.

Being immersed in the worlds of business, marketing and the rest of it, where everyone is circling like sharks around everyone else trying to extract dollars, I think the coolest thing about what happened tonight is that I saw the opposite is true too.

I’ll never know their reasons and could speculate for as long as we all live… but there are genuine people who just want to help with no need for reward.

Seems like a nice group to be a part of whenever you can… (for today, just ignore those 3 links 👇).