Photo : yphoonski ( iStock )

There’s been a lot of debate on this website recently about the best grocery store. Commenters have shown overwhelming support for Publix, and a recent news story out of Florida appears to support them. Not about the food, but about the kindness of its workers.




Bob Eck, who lives Lakewood Ranch just outside Tampa, would regularly bring his dog, Bobo, with him to Publix when he did his grocery shopping. Two employees, Leslie Hinton and Kathy Clifton, befriended both Eck and Bobo. One day when Eck came in without the dog, they asked where he was, and Eck told them that Bobo had been hit by a car and killed.

“So we all cried,” Hinton told WFLA-TV. “And Kathy actually is a big dog person also, and she said ‘we need to get him another dog.’”


“When Bob came in and told us and we just saw the way he was, we just had to do it,” Clifton said.

Eck wasn’t sure at first, but Clifton was persuasive, and the following Saturday, the three of them went to an animal shelter in nearby Bradenton, where Eck fell in love with a four-year-old pup named Peppy, who was scheduled to be euthanized. Hinton and Clifton paid the adoption fee out of their own pockets.

That is true customer service, and also a great act of friendship.