So I'm here at the kitchen table tonight (my father-in-law over in the living room watching T.V. with the volume up a little higher than it should be and my wife downstairs asleep, exhausted from the holidays) and I just read an article at
Time.com (
Where "Check Please" is Your Call) about restaurants that let the customers pay what they feel "their meal is worth." In some cases, for those who have no money, the restaurant trades the meal for one hour's worth of work. With two restaurants now doing this in the U.S., one in Salt Lake City, Utah (One World Café) and the other in Denver, CO (SAME Café) patrons seem to like it and abuse of the honor system is minimal.
The thing that got me was this sentence:
Since opening, one man has regularly come in and left money on the
counter without eating, stating "I was blessed today so I though I'd
pass it on." He's homeless.
Wow. The selflessness of that just floors me. I was expecting people who could afford more to leave more and the like but I was not expecting a homeless man to give to help others in such a fashion. Like others out there, I've always seen people with down-n-out stories on street corners or highway on-ramps and thought "If I give him money, he's just going to spend it on booze or drugs". Now though, I'm not so sure. Tell you one thing though, I believe that there is more honesty there than in any corporate board room or politician out there.