Starbucks Customer Breaks “Pay It Forward” Streak for $46 Order

The idea of “paying it forward” is a nice concept. You head down to your local pizza coffee shop and a stranger buys your slice/beverage, so you decide to buy the next customer’s meal/drink in the hopes of brightening up someone else’s day.

You were planning on spending some money anyway, so why not do it for somebody else, right?

Well, the problem with that is that some people place larger orders than others. So let’s say you’re headed to Starbucks and were only intending on dropping $6 for whatever caffeinated sugar water you intended on ingesting, would you “pay it forward” for someone with an order that cost twice as much as yours? What about three times? Four times?

It might seem unfair to expect someone to spend more money than they intended on, however, if you hear that a bunch of other people are “paying it forward” you may feel pressured to keep the streak alive.

And this is the kind of Larry David-esque scenario TikTok user @im_blessed55 found himself in while in a Starbucks drive-thru.

In a 14-second clip, he explained that his drink only cost him $6, while the car behind him had an order worth a whopping $46. Yes, someone spent $46 on coffee in a Starbucks drive-thru and he refused to pay for their order. The thing is, he ultimately ended up halting a 23 car streak, which means that he got his drink for free, but the vehicle behind him had to pay for their full order.

“How y’all feel about this am I wrong? What would y’all have done?” he asked his 66,000+ followers in the now-viral TikTok video.

The clip featured a text overlay with the annoying automatic speaking robot voice speaking aloud for viewers: “At Starbucks, they were doing the pay for the person behind you thing. I pulled up and ended a 23-car streak!!”

Most of his followers seemed to agree that he did the right thing: paying $46 for coffee is kind of crazy. One commenter who said that they’re a drive-thru employee commended the TikTok-er for “ending” the streak.

“As a drive-through employee, my favorite people were the ones who would end these godforsaken lines,” @broccilicheddarsoup quipped.

Then there were some who thought that the least he could’ve done was contribute his amount of money to the order, leaving the car behind him to front $40.

What do you think? Was he in the wrong for at least not putting a bit of money towards the other customer’s order? Or did whoever was driving the car catch wind of the “pay-it-forward” streak and get back in the line and hope that they could convince someone else to cover the cost of their massive order?