This news coverage is so aggravating to me, for many reasons: 1) While I dont doubt that the woman who started this chain reaction did so with a genuine spirit of generosity, the fact of the matter is that buying a Starbucks customer a Starbucks drink is not a significant act of kindness or generosity. If the person was already in line at Starbucks and was already planning to order a drink, then he or she must have been able to afford the drink they were planning to buy, which is what the woman bought for him or her. 2) When one person receives a drink paid for by someone else and then pays for someone elses drink, no significant action of any kind occurs. For the 456 people who arrived at Starbucks, received a Starbucks beverage, and paid for a Starbucks beverage, they were on average unaffected by kindness. They simply had the exact Starbucks experience they expected, in which a customer pays for and receives a beverage. I guess it had the added element of a sort of gambling, like a crap shoot, since some people ended up paying for a beverage costing less than the one they received, while others paid more. 3) If the so-called generosity of the first 457 people was such a great thing, why is this article primarily about the existence of a woman who declined to participate? Shouldnt the headline have been 457 people participate in Pay It Forward line? The real headline here is Woman vilified for becoming beneficiary of generous act. Because inasmuch as the woman who started the line was the only person to commit a generous act, the woman who ended it was the only person to benefit from that act. Everyone in between was, I would argue, actually psychologically harmed by being allowed to believe that their slacktivism did something to improve the world. 4) This is not how paying it forward works! I understand that the phrase predates the movie, but I think the movie is what brought it into the popular lexicon. And in the movie, the recipient of a PIF favor is asked to perform *three* favors for others, and--importantly--each should be a favor that the recipient would have otherwise been unable to complete or achieve. Never before has it been suggested that the optimal way to PIF is by immediately transferring to another person the effects of the favor done to you, thereby purposefully negating their objective effect on you. Nor have I ever heard that a PIF favor is to be paid forward at the direction of the favors intermediary by completing a specific task at a time and place recommended by the intermediary. And, as I already pointed out, not only is this favor *not* one that the recipient would have been unable to complete, but it is a task that the recipient is literally in the process of completing at the moment when his or her agency is usurped. Since the whole process is not a worthwhile implementation of the pay it forward philosophy, and the news coverage of it is so inane, I applaud the efforts of Florida blogger Peter Schorsch to end it and draw attention to its stupidity: https://gma.yahoo/florida-man-deliberately-scuttles-pay-forward-starbucks-line-165749709--abc-news-topstories.html?vp=1
Posted on: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 21:54:22 +0000
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