Speechless

Tonight I decided to take a break from my research by clicking around the Unbridled Acts of Kindness campaign run by the Red Robin hamburger chain. I went into it with my usual perpendicular mindset, reflecting on how the company had leveraged altruism and community to build its own brand.

Then I read this email from a customer, and the PR stuff became painfully human:

Yesterday we had a little outing to go buy some new shoes for my daughter. We were at the store looking at shoes and my daughter seemed to be actually a little interested in something for once but not at the level she should've been. A young lady, wearing a Red Robin shirt, was in the aisle with us looking for shoes as her phone rang. As she was digging in her purse to answer it, a necklace and a bunch of pins fell out. My daughter bent down to pick them up for her, but just held on to them looking at all of the things on it. The lady put her phone away and asked her if she thought those were pretty cool. My daughter nodded yes. The young lady asked what happened to her arm. A pretty innocent question for the most part; with kids you just think they fell off their bike or something. I braced myself for my daughter to shut down and just shrug but she said, "My daddy got mad. And now we live in someone else’s house that’s why we're buying me shoes." While most people would've gotten embarrassed or changed the subject, the lady responded, "I'm sorry that had to happen to you. But you've still got your mom and that’s something to be happy about." Then my daughter looked at her and asked if she ever got sad. The girl said yes. There was a few seconds of silence and my daughter said "What do you do when you're sad?" The young lady told her that whenever she gets sad she thinks of something or looks at something that makes her happy. My daughter replied, "Like ice cream?" The lady laughed and said that if that made her happy then she sure could try it.

My daughter said she didn't have any special things to look at. So the young lady told my daughter to pick something of hers that she likes the best and that whenever she gets sad she can think of the happy time that she went to buy shoes with her mom. My daughter picked three pins and the girl handed them over to her. My daughter just held on to them and she smiled at me for the first time in weeks.

That moment changed something in my daughter. Maybe it was the right time, maybe it was the lady’s friendly smile, or maybe my daughter really did just need something physical to remind her to smile. Whatever happened, my daughter and I spent the best evening together and I put her to bed and she had those her pins pinned on the edge of her pillowcase. This woman has no idea what she did. I wish I hadn't been frozen watching this so I could've asked her name or pulled her aside and told her that was the most my daughter had spoken in two weeks. I wished this woman could know how she just made our life a little bit better during a really hard time.