That night, I deposited the check. My hands shook as I signed the back.
I didn’t spend it right away.
I thought about the letter. About “ripples.”
A week later, I asked my manager if we had any discretion for customers who came up short—just a few dollars here and there.
He looked at me thoughtfully. “Why?”
I pulled out the envelope. “Because I think we should.”
Corporate eventually approved a small discretionary fund—nothing flashy, no announcements. Just a quiet option for cashiers to help when it mattered.
We called it the Neighbor Fund.
I used part of the money to fix my car so it wouldn’t stall at stoplights anymore. I paid off the credit card I’d been juggling for years. I slept better.
And sometimes—when a parent stood at my register counting coins with shaking hands—I nodded to my manager, slid the item through, and said the same words that had changed everything for me:
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