The Conversation
Wait Until You Hear What One Man Paid For His Favorite Pastry
How much would you pay for your favorite food? Five dollars? Fifteen?
I mean, the oatmeal chocolate chip cookies at my neighborhood café are really, really good. But would I pay a thousand dollars for one? I'm not so sure.
But that's just what one Ohio man did when he learned that his local bakery was struggling to make ends meet during the coronavirus crisis.
The Original Goodie Shop in Upper Arlington has been open for 70 years, and in Emilie Smith's family for 50 years. Now, like many other small businesses, their revenue has dropped significantly since stay-at-home orders have been put in place to help stop the spread of the coronavirus.
The Goodie Shop is still open for pick-up orders, so when the anonymous man came to get his favorite chocolate-covered, custard-filled pastry, he asked Smith if he could pay $1,000 for it instead of the normal price of $1.50.
Smith said she was in shock when the man proposed the offer.
"I couldn't talk," Smith told NBC4i. "I teared up."
She said that all she could get out when the man asked her a second time was a "yes!"
The customer had been coming to the shop for decades. He recently got his stimulus check from the U.S. government and wanted to put it to good use.
The money will provide an entire truckload of ingredients for The Goodie Shop to operate for at least another two weeks. Smith says the donation was especially critical since their Easter business was cut in half this year.
"It's payroll for my full-time baker," Smith said, still overwhelmed by the kind gesture. "It's an unfathomable, generous gift."
While the bakery has closed its doors to the public, the staff is still taking orders by phone, and they've recently started putting together cookie-decorating kits for families to do at home – an effort that Smith says they can afford to keep doing, thanks to the man's donation.
Smith hopes that other folks will be inspired by the story to help their own favorite businesses during the crisis.
"I would say support as much as you can, even if you're ordering it for families, friends, neighbors," she said. "Support any business that you're passionate about right now, especially small business, because they do, like you said, kind of have a small margin to work with to start with."
