It would be really fun to work for Carolyn Olsen, who let her staff at Sage Book Store (Shelton, WA) give away books, gift items and coffee at random on Saturday, in remembrance of 9/11. “All day long the staff could randomly pick, and the joy it brought to the customers spilled over to all of us,” Olsen said. “One of our employees said it was her favorite day to work here.”
Olsen says some customers were baffled by the concept at first. “We gave away many cups of coffee with the emphasis to ‘pay it forward.’ . . . One gentleman did not understand it so he handed his to the lady behind him . . . She in-turn handed it to the girl behind her . . .” Another customer gave her free cookbook to someone else who was coveting it, and so the store gave her another copy.
Olsen says it was one of the store’s biggest grossing days, even though they didn’t advertise about it. “We would have lost something,” Olsen says. “It was purely RANDOM.”