An Arkansas mom says she bought the entire inventory at a Payless shoe store because her daughter wanted to help out a classmate and others in need.
Carrie Jernigan, her husband and their three kids have been sitting on nearly 1,500 pairs of Payless shoes since May — and they hope to buy more before handing them out to those in need ahead of the new school year.
Jernigan says the whole initiative started because of her eldest daughter, Harper, who asked her to buy an extra pair of shoes while they were browsing the going-out-of-business sale at Payless in May.
“She has the biggest heart and she said: ‘There’s a boy in my class who loves the Avengers, and his shoes are too small. Could you buy him these?’ And I was like, ‘Of course,'” Jernigan told KFSM.
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Jernigan says she brought the shoes to the checkout and jokingly asked the clerk how much it would be to buy out the whole store. She left her number with the clerk, and a Payless regional manager called her later in the day to tell her she’d been approved to make a mass purchase.
She thought she was buying a few hundred pairs of kids’ shoes, but that number tripled when another Payless delivery came in later that week.
“The next thing you know we are trying to figure out how to get almost 1,500 shoes home with us that day,” she said.
She did not say how much she paid for the shoes.
The Jernigans now plan to give the shoes away at a back-to-school event on Aug. 10. They’ve also been working with local charities to collect money to pay for kids’ school supplies.
Jernigan says she’s very proud of her daughter Harper as well as her two younger kids, who have helped with the initiative.
“I don’t care what they do in life as long as they’re kind and good people,” she said.