When Mom Can’t Afford Shoes, Payless Employees Step In

Rachel Grumman Bender
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A mom is grateful to two Payless employees who stepped in to help her pay for her daughter’s shoes. The mom took to Facebook to publicly thank them on Payless’s page.

Katy Sypher-Piper went into Payless in Old Saybrook, Conn., on Jan. 21 to buy snow boots for her 2 ½-year-old daughter Ava and shoes for 10-month-old son Andrew. She couldn’t afford to spend more than $30 total, but saw that Payless was having a “BoGo” (buy one, get one free) sale. Sypher-Piper let the two employees helping her know that she was on a strict budget.

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As they measured the children’s feet, the employees and Sypher-Piper chatted about Ava’s love of the movie Frozen and her daughter’s challenging medical history. Ava has respiratory issues that cause her to occasionally stop breathing, according to the GoFundMe page Sypher-Piper set up to raise money to train their dog to alert them when Ava’s having an attack. “I said I was nervously waiting for some important test results for my daughter, and it was all I could think about,” she wrote on Facebook.

Ava picked a pair of waterproof cloth-lined Frozen boots for $44 — well past Sypher-Piper’s budget for two, let alone one, pairs of shoes. That’s when the Payless employees stepped in. “I became pretty tearful as the ladies began putting their heads together about coupons and how to get [the] price down,” she wrote.

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Andrew and Ava wearing their new shoes.

The employees then told Sypher-Piper that they would cover the cost of the boots, as well as some socks. “These wonder[ful] amazing employees of yours told me they were paying for my kids’ boots and socks, that I had enough to worry about, and to use money for the kids and food,” she wrote in her post, which has more than 8,600 likes and over 1,500 shares.

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Sypher-Piper added, “I have been pretty down lately, and this act of kindness is so amazing and uplifting to me. I am so grateful and wanted to say a big thank you and hope you have some sort of employee recognition program.”

Photos: Katy Sypher-Piper/Facebook

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