What started as a random act of kindness from one man paying for the car behind him in a drive-thru resulted in over 900 cars also taking part in the "pay it forward" chain. But do you know who the real hero in this story is?
00:00:00.000For our daily cancellation, we are canceling the dreaded, the stupid, the pointless, pay-it-forward drive-thru chains.
00:00:16.380Now, if you aren't familiar with this thoroughly first-world phenomenon, here's a story about the latest one to pop up from CNN.
00:00:22.840There's a bunch of stories about this yesterday, but CNN says,
00:00:25.940What started as a random act of kindness from one man paying for the car behind him in a Dairy Queen drive-thru resulted in over 900 cars also taking part in the pay-it-forward chain.
00:00:37.140At a drive-thru in Brainerd, Minnesota, over 100 miles north of Minneapolis, people stepped up in a small way to show one another that they care.
00:00:43.740Tina Jensen, the store manager at one of the two Dairy Queens in town, told CNN,
00:00:47.260A man came by the drive-thru window on Thursday and asked if he could pay for his meal and for the car behind him.
00:00:51.940Jensen told her cashier, This tends to happen once in a while, but at most it lasts for 15 or 20 cars and fizzles out.
00:00:57.940This time, the chain continued for two and a half days, with over 900 cars participating, raking in $10,000 in sales.
00:01:04.500When the next customer came to the fast food chain's window, Jensen explained what the man in front of them had done, and the act of kindness continued to multiply.
00:01:11.380Jensen said, There's all different types of ways to help people.
00:01:13.880I think this touched a lot of people that we didn't even know it touched, deeper than we know.
00:01:18.540And you don't know what's going on in a person's life.
00:01:20.800When the chain closed for the night, on Thursday, one car left $10 to begin the chain back up on Friday morning,
00:01:27.460and then the same thing happened on Friday night, and it began on Saturday morning.
00:01:44.240The real hero is whoever broke the chain and simply accepted the charity from the person in front and drove away,
00:01:50.980leaving the person behind them to pay for their own damned fudge sundae.
00:01:54.060All of the people in between the first guy, who may have been well-intentioned but should have thought more about the consequences of his actions,
00:02:02.380and the last guy who had the courage to end the whole charade, everybody else, these were just sheep.
00:02:08.100They weren't performing acts of kindness.
00:02:10.880They did it because they were too embarrassed and felt too much social pressure not to do it.
00:02:14.860If it's charity at all, it's coerced charity, and not for a meaningful cause either.
00:02:19.760The people in the drive-thru line have disposable income that they were already planning to spend on the same kind of junk that you're buying.
00:02:28.540Really, this kind of charity, if it is charity at all, again, is similar to the sort of charity that you perform when you're checking out at the grocery store,
00:02:37.460and the cashier asks if you want to round up and donate your change to, you know, orphaned sea otters or whatever.
00:02:44.860The only reason you say yes is because you'd feel like a cheap ass refusing to give your 27 cents to the sea otters.
00:02:50.900It's not something that comes from the kindness of your heart.
00:02:53.960If you wanted to help the sea otters on your own time, you would.
00:02:57.560Right now, all you want to do is pay for your carton of eggs and your package of paper towels and leave.
00:03:02.220The grocery store is taking advantage of your sense of shame to bilk another few cents out of you,
00:03:07.940another few cents of which they will surely take a cut, by the way.
00:03:10.480But while the grocery store charity gambit is a calculated ploy to take advantage of people who don't have the spine to say no,
00:03:17.120the pay it forward chain is more of a case of collective insanity.
00:03:21.340Everyone is doing it, but nobody knows why.
00:03:24.280If you want to understand how crazy it is, imagine how it would come across if you took,
00:03:29.520you know, take the fast food and the cars out of the equation.
00:03:33.320OK, now imagine you're standing in a long line of people waiting for something and the guy in front turns to you,
00:03:42.120gives you five dollars out of his wallet and then suggests that you turn around and give the person behind you
00:03:47.400some money out of your wallet and on and on and on.
00:03:50.420Now you're all just passing money backwards for absolutely no reason.
00:03:55.200Nobody wants to be doing it or knows why they're doing it.
00:03:57.760But it continues until some free thinker accepts the cash from the person in front and says,
00:04:03.160hey, thanks for the money, puts it in their pocket and gives nothing to the person behind.
00:04:07.420That person, again, is the admirable character in this strange saga.
00:04:12.420Now, if I sound like I'm speaking from a place of personal trauma when I talk about this, that's because I am.
00:04:18.080I used to live near a Starbucks where this would happen frequently.
00:04:21.180I was duped by it, I'm ashamed to admit, one time and one time only.
00:04:26.220I pulled up to the window to pay for my one single coffee for $2.65
00:04:29.960and the girl at the window told me that the bill had been paid by the guy in front.
00:04:34.920Then she informed me that they were doing this pay it forward thing where each person pays for the one behind.
00:04:39.920And she asked me if I wanted to participate and told me that, you know,
00:04:42.260they kept the chain going for 50 cars so far or however many it was.