Warren Buffett Invites Good Deed Dairy Queen Teen to Shareholders Meeting
Joey Prusak confronted a customer who took $20 belonging to a blind man.
Sept. 20, 2013 -- A Minnesota teen's act of kindness for a blind customer has gone viral and has prompted an outpouring of praise, including from billionaire Warren Buffett, who has invited the teen to his company shareholder's meeting next year.
Joey Prusak, 19, has been hailed as a Good Samaritan after he gave $20 out of his own wallet to a blind customer who dropped $20 and the money was taken by a woman who refused to return it.
"I was just doing what I thought was right," Prusak told the Associated Press. "I did it without even really thinking about it. ... Ninety-nine out of 100 people would've done the same thing as me."
The teen's good deed went viral after a customer who witnessed the incident wrote an email about it to Dairy Queen and the store printed it out and posted it. A customer took a photo of the email and it spread through Facebook and Reddit.
Since then, supporters have flooded the Dairy Queen where Prusak is a manager with visits and phone calls. People have offered him jobs and given him money for college.
He even got a very special phone call from billionaire Warren Buffett, whose company owns Dairy Queen, as well was Dairy Queen president and CEO John Gainor.
Buffett requested that Prusak attend the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting in May 2014 in Omaha, Neb., so that he can meet him, Dairy Queen spokesman Dean Peters told ABCNews.com today. Buffett is chairman, president and CEO of the famed multinational holding company.
Prusak will be Gainor's special guest at the meeting.
"We're thrilled that Joey, one of our young managers in Hopkins, would do something like that, to go above and beyond to help out a customer like he did," Peters said. "We couldn't be more proud."
Peters said the company is "absolutely" working on a way to reward Prusak but aren't ready to make a public announcement yet.
"Here's somebody that did something good for someone else and no one asked him to do it," he said. "It strikes a chord in a lot of people."
Prusak was working at the Hopkins, Minn., Dairy Queen where he is a manager when he noticed a blind man drop a $20 bill on the ground and was unaware of it. An older woman in the line picked up the bill and put it in her purse instead of returning it to the man, Prusak said.
Prusak asked the woman to give the man his money back, but she said it was her money that she had dropped. He asked her again to return the money, but she refused. He then asked her to leave the store, as he would not serve someone so disrespectful.
"She got extremely angry and began to swear at your employee," the witnessing customer wrote in the email to Dairy Queen. "He stayed calm and never gave her any attitude."
The woman left the store and the customer who wrote the email told Prusak that he had done the right thing and then went and sat in the lobby near the blind man.
"What happened next I would have never expected," the email said.
Prusak approached the man, opened his own wallet and gave the man $20.
"I was in shock by the generosity that your employee had, taking his own money out of his own wallet to give to the customer because some other lady decided to steal something that wasn't hers," the email said.
Then Prusak went back to work.