PAPILLION, Neb. (KMTV) — Sauced by Alfaro is a popular restaurant in downtown Papillion, but last Friday, someone stole a tip jar from restaurant employees.
Owner, Chef Michelle Alfaro, responded to the theft on social media. Instead of complaining she wrote: “We don’t know what you’re going through, but I pray it gets better.”
Alfaro also shared a graphic with the message “Kindness Always Wins.”
“It was important for me to make the post because it was just kind of eating at me,” she said. “But it was coming from all the wrong places. It was coming from a place of frustration, anger, sadness — all of those things. And I would write the post and I would delete it, write it and delete it — and I just knew that God wanted me to do something different. So I literally sat my phone down, prayed, and asked how he wanted me to handle it. And it was a quick response of ‘with kindness.’”
She hoped her social media post might reach the person who stole the money.
“It reminded me that we never know what someone’s going through. And if they had to seek in something such an act of desperation, what was challenging them? What were they going through?”
It’s hard to say if the person who took her employees’ tips saw the post, but members of Alfaro’s community certainly did. They responded with donations many times greater than the cash lost in the tip jar. Alfaro says, at first, she declined the help.
“But they were so adamant about helping us and our team, and making someone else’s wrong, right,” she said. “I think every person on our team experienced some sort of emotion when they saw the community come together. And when I distributed the tips that we received from people’s generous giving it impacted them in ways that I won’t even fully understand.”
Alfaro says her original social media post has been viewed by more than 80,000 people across the country. In addition to cash donations, the restaurant will be gifted security cameras and a sealed tip jar.
“It helped our entire team, so it wasn’t just the people that worked that night, these people blessed our entire team and that’s awesome,” she said.
Alfaro says it’s hard to receive kindness from others, but the outpouring of support from the community has affected her employees in ways she doesn’t even know.
WATCH THE CHEAP EATS SEGMENT WITH SAUCED BY ALFARO
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