By Margery A. Beck, AP, Dec. 15, 2011
OMAHA, Neb. (AP)—The young father stood in line at the Kmart layaway counter,
wearing dirty clothes and worn-out boots. With him were three small children.
He asked to pay something on his bill because he knew he wouldn’t be
able to afford it all before Christmas. Then a mysterious woman stepped up to
the counter.
“She told him, ‘No, I’m paying for it,’” recalled Edna Deppe, assistant
manager at the store in Indianapolis. “He just stood there and looked at her
and then looked at me and asked if it was a joke. I told him it wasn’t, and
that she was going to pay for him. And he just busted out in tears.”
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 couldn’t afford, especially toys and children’s
clothes set aside by impoverished parents.
Before she left the store Tuesday evening, the Indianapolis woman in her
mid-40s had paid the layaway orders for as many as 50 people. On the way out,
she handed out $50 bills and paid for two carts of toys for a woman in line at
the cash register.
“She was doing it in the memory of her husband who had just died, and
she said she wasn’t going to be able to spend it and wanted to make people
happy with it,” Deppe said. The woman did not identify herself and only asked
people to “remember Ben,” an apparent reference to her husband.
Deppe, who said she’s worked in retail for 40 years, had never seen
anything like it.
“It was like an angel fell out of the sky and appeared in our store,”
she said.
Most of the donors have done their giving secretly.
Dona Bremser, an Omaha nurse, was at work when a Kmart employee called
to tell her that someone had paid off the $70 balance of her layaway account,
which held nearly $200 in toys for her 4-year-old son.
“I was speechless,” Bremser said. “It made me believe in Christmas
again.”
Dozens of other customers have received similar calls in Nebraska,
Michigan, Iowa, Indiana and Montana.
The benefactors generally ask to help families who are squirreling 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 sad memories of layaways lost prompted at least one good Samaritan
to pay off the accounts of five people at an Omaha Kmart, said Karl Graff, the
store’s assistant manager.
“She told me that when she was younger, her mom used to set up things on
layaway at Kmart, but they rarely were able to pay them off because they just
didn’t have the money for it,” Graff said.
He called a woman who had been helped, “and she broke down in tears on
the phone with me. She wasn’t sure she was going to be able to pay off their
layaway and was afraid their kids weren’t going to have anything for
Christmas.”
“You know, 50 bucks may not sound like a lot, but I tell you what, at
the right time, it may as well be a million dollars for some people,” Graff
said.
Lori Stearnes of Omaha also benefited from the generosity of a stranger
who paid all but $58 of her $250 layaway bill for toys for her four youngest
grandchildren.
Stearnes said she and her husband live paycheck to paycheck, but she plans
to use the money she was saving for the toys to help pay for someone else’s
layaway.
In Missoula, Mont., a man spent more than $1,200 to pay down the
balances of six customers whose layaway orders were about to be returned to a
Kmart store’s inventory because of late payments.
Store employees reached one beneficiary on her cellphone at Seattle
Children’s Hospital, where her son was being treated for an undisclosed
illness.
“She was yelling at the nurses, ‘We’re going to have Christmas after
all!’” store manager Josine Murrin said.
Angie Torres, a stay-at-home mother of four children under the age of 8,
was in the Indianapolis Kmart on Tuesday to make a payment on her layaway bill
when she learned the woman next to her was paying off her account.
“I started to cry. I couldn’t believe it,” said Torres, who doubted she
would have been able to pay off the balance. “I was in disbelief. I hugged her
and gave her a kiss.”
