It’s the time of year where Christmas spirit kicks in and we see random acts of kindness. This years there’s a new trend in retail - and Kmart in the US is feeling the positive effects!
Across the US there are good samaritans paying off layby accounts to help out people through the festive season. There’s been stories popping up everywhere. Here’s a great one I found at: todayonline.com
OMAHA (Nebraska) - After a Good Samaritan helped her pay off the layaway bill she had accumulated to buy Christmas gifts for her grandchildren, Ms Lori Stearnes planned to collect her paycheck and head to Kmart anyway.
Her new plan: Pay the stranger’s kindness forward by using the money she had budgeted to instead support somebody else.
“... With all the things going on in the world, just to have someone do that is so, I don’t know, it’s hard to put into words,” said Ms Stearnes, 53, of Omaha.
At Kmart stores across the country, Santa seems to be getting some help: Anonymous donors are paying off strangers’ layaway accounts, buying the Christmas gifts other families cannot afford, especially toys and children’s clothes set aside by impoverished parents.
Ms Stearnes said at first she thought it was a joke when someone from the Omaha store called to say someone had paid off most of her layaway bill for toys and outfits she bought for the youngest four of her seven grandchildren.
The total bill was about US$250 (S$326), but after the stranger helped, she only had a US$58 balance, she said. Ms Stearnes, who cleans medical instruments at a hospital, said she and her husband live paycheck to paycheck and that layaway often helps spread out the costs of Christmas.
Dozens of other customers have received similar calls in Nebraska, Michigan, Iowa, Indiana and Montana.
The benefactors generally ask to help families who are squirrelling away items for young children. They often pay a portion of the balance, usually all but a few dollars or cents so the layaway order stays in the store’s system.
The phenomenon seems to have begun in Michigan before spreading, Kmart executives said.
“It is honestly being driven by people wanting to do a good deed at this time of the year,” said Ms Salima Yala, Kmart’s division vice-president for layaway.
The good Samaritans seem to be visiting mainly Kmart stores, though a Wal-Mart spokesman said a few of his stores in Joplin, Missouri, and Chicago, have also seen some layaway accounts paid off.
Kmart may be the focus of layaway generosity, Ms Yala said, because it is one of the few large discount stores that has offered layaway year-round for about four decades.
Under the programme, customers can make purchases but let the store hold onto their merchandise as they pay it off slowly over several weeks. AP
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