Buying hundreds of cups of coffee for strangers seems to have become something of a fad in Canada. It started last Monday when a man walked into a coffee shop in the western city of Edmonton and paid for 500 cups of coffee for no apparent reason.
No one was sure why he did this and the man remained anonymous.
Two days later, someone who had heard the story spent almost $900 to buy coffee for everyone a shop in the nearby city of Calgary.
“We’ve been through so much here with the floods and everything else, and he just wanted to get some good spirits going here in Calgary,” said the manager of the store Kelli Urquhart.
The good spirits caught on and by the end of the week over 5,500 cups of coffee had been bought in different cities across the country.
Who says we only cover bad news.
Coffee-givers spread the love
Monday:
- A mystery man walks into a Tim Hortons coffee shop in downtown Edmonton, Alberta and pays for his own, plus 500 cups of coffee.
Wednesday:
- An anonymous Calgary, Alberta donor pays almost $900 to buy coffee for everyone behind him in queue at a Tim.
Thursday:
- An Ottawa bus driver buys $850 worth of coffee to pep up his peers around the Ottawa Trainyards location.
- A man buys 500 cups for others at the Tim Hortons in the Easthill Centre in Red Deer, Alberta.
- A man picks up the tab for 500 cups at Edmonton’s Royal Alexandra Hospital.
- Later that afternoon, a Monica Kavanagh, whose father is admitted in the same hospital, buys 800 more cups on hearing about the earlier act of generosity.
- A Saskatoon, Saskatchewan coffee-philanthropist buys 500 coffees for customers behind him in queue
Friday:
- Saskatoon radio station Rock 102 buys 500 coffee gifts.
- Another customer buys 285 more cups just after the station staff leave, making a total of $1,375 worth of free coffee at that venue.
- A patron at Northern Alberta Institute of Technology gives $500 worth of coffee to customers at the school.
- A donor buys 500 cups in the Chestermere suburb of Calgary.
- Three anonymous patrons buy their fellow coffee drinkers hundreds of dollars worth of coffee at the same High River, Alta., coffee shop.
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