‘Pour it forward’: Toronto man gives Tim Hortons $200 for fellow customers

Since December 2012, we've shared story after story of people "pouring it forward." All over Canada, Good Samaritans were paying for strangers' coffee.

In Edmonton, one man bought 500 coffees for unsuspecting Tim Hortons customers. In Winnipeg, a chain reaction of goodwill saw 228 customers in a row pay for each other's coffee. And in Toronto, a pregnant couple walked into a Tim Hortons in Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital and paid for the next 500 small double-doubles.

In face, about 40 locations around Canada reported significant donations last summer.

"We’re very fortunate to have very generous guests," said Tim Hortons spokeswoman Michelle Robichaud. "We saw a huge outbreak of generosity, if you will, happen this past summer."

This week, it happened again: a kind stranger bought free coffees for strangers at a Toronto Tim Hortons.

On Wednesday morning, a man entered a coffee shop on Yonge Street near Broadway Avenue and gave a $100 gift card to each of the two registers in the store. He told staff to pay for all subsequent orders until the money ran out.

He didn't give his name, but he did leave flyers behind with the url for a Facebook page called Be Nice Toronto and a message encouraging people to "pay it forward."

Because of the morning rush, the money ran out in half an hour.

"It's nice to see that kind of humanity still exists," Belinda Fernades, one of the customers to receive a free coffee, told the Toronto Star. "I wouldn’t have gone back and double-looped or anything like that. That kind of stuff is done out of a good place and you have to, on the receiving end, be good as well and pay it forward."

On the Be Nice Toronto page, organizers insisted the recent Tim Hortons generosity wasn't a marketing stunt:

"Just noticed that the Toronto Star mentioned us this evening!! So crazy that this spread so quick!! Was reading through the comments sections on a few sites and there's a lot of people wondering if this was a Tim Hortons marketing campaign — it wasn't," they wrote.

"Like 1000s of people before us, we just wanted to do something nice with the hopes that a simple kind gesture would have a ripple effect in the community. This FB Page was setup to capture the joy and gratitude that each and every one of you is spreading in your local community and share it with the universe at large."