Photo Of A Grocery Store Employee Escorting A Blind Woman Home Goes Viral [Photo]
One grocery store employee’s act of kindness went viral after a passerby snapped a photo of his efforts. An employee at Canadian grocery store Sobey’s was photographed as he escorted a blind woman home with her groceries in the snow.
Global News reports that Austin MacNeill, 22, has only worked at the Sobey’s grocery store for six months, but has become fast friends with a local blind woman who frequents the store for groceries. MacNeill says he met legally-blind 72-year-old Mary Cogswell approximately three months ago when she was looking for assistance in carrying her groceries to her nearby home. MacNeill says she is a “really nice lady” who “makes it easy” for Sobey’s workers.
“She’s just a really nice lady. She’s just friendly to everybody and she knows exactly what she wants when she goes around and it makes it easy for us.”
Cogswell says she comes to the Sobey’s grocery store several times per week, and that the staff have been helping her get her groceries home for over five years.
“Once they got to know me, they started automatically, on their own, doing it and asking the supervisor if they could walk me up and the supervisor would say yes. If that person couldn’t walk me up, they would always see to it that [somebody] did.”
Though the acts of kindness have taken place for years, it wasn’t until an image of the blind woman being escorted by MacNeill was uploaded to Facebook that the actions got noticed by the public. In fact, MacNeill, Cogswell, and the Sobey’s staff were surprised at how quickly the image went viral.
“In just 24 hours, the image has gotten more than 13,000 likes and has been shared more than 5,000 times.”
The Daily Mail notes that MacNeill never expected the photo to get so much attention. However, now that it has, he hopes that it will help inspire someone else to do something nice for their neighbors. Cogswell says that without the employees at Sobey’s grocery store, “it would be hard.”
“If they weren’t able to help me then I would have to make extra trips down there to get what I need.”
