We’re going to guess that Walmart cashiers see plenty of customers in the course of a day who can’t afford all of the items that they’ve selected and must put something back. Yet something made a cashier in upstate New York stop and reach into her pocket when an older man at her register couldn’t afford to buy all of his food, contributing forty dollars of her own.

The customer handed over money, but it wasn’t enough to cover everything that he had selected. “Some of it was food, and some of it was for his pet,” the cashier explained to local TV station WTEN. “I felt really bad for him. I didn’t want him to go home and not have something that he really needed to eat.” The next customer in line offered the cashier money to cover the $40 contribution, and she declined, saying that she wasn’t allowed to accept it.

We want to believe that this incident really happened, because it is fantastic, if not necessarily sustainable unless there are a lot of secret millionaires working at Walmart. No one who directly witnessed the incident is quoted in the TV story, including the manager, who simply says that she “heard about” the incident.

Still, we want to believe that there are secret angels everywhere in the world, including behind Walmart cash registers, and this story remains impressive.

Walmart cashier helps customer buy groceries [WTEN]

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