A Florida man's $20,000 kind gesture in a Wal-Mart assisted a woman from having to give up items she had on lay away The Orlando Sentinel reported Thursday.
Gregory Parady was in the store purchasing bicycles when he unintentionally heard a woman discussing her burden so he gave her the money to pay for them.
"My wife and I don't want for a bunch of things and we know a lot of people do. I have a lot of people who work for me who are single moms," Gregory Parady told The Sentinel. Parady has a financial planning firm in The Villages. "It just hit me the right way at the right time. It was just a special thing to be able to do it. I'm sure I'll do something fun next year. I do something every year. This is kind of an unexpected thing."
The news has been the talk of the store's layaway area.
"(There were) "tears rolling down all of our eyes," Deb Davis, an assistant manager at the store told The Sentinel. "A lot of these people were going to have to cancel their layaways. All week long we've been running across people [saying] 'I really wanted to give this to my kids, but I can't afford it. I've gotten comments like, My kids are going to get the Christmas that I wanted. "This whole week, it's been wonderful to be back here [in the layaway department.] Everybody's talking about it."
The news is the latest development since layaway angels assisted customers with similar issues at Wal-Marts, and Kmarts throughout the United States.
Wal-Mart however usually sees 1,000 customers annually lend a hand to other people, but Parady's is considered at the top.
"It's extremely rare" to get a donation in the $20,000 range, spokeswoman Alex Serra told The Sentinel Thursday.
