Actor, comedian, and filmmaker Tyler Perry is perhaps best known for his “Madea” character and his long-running sitcom, Tyler Perry’s House of Payne. But after today, he’s probably going to be best known for his generosity towards a very specific group of people shopping at very specific Walmart locations around Atlanta, his longtime hometown.
On Thursday morning, at the East Point and Douglasville locations of the retail store, Perry paid off the entire Walmart layaway department. Well, almost. Individuals with items on reserve in those stores can go pick them up for a single penny.
I was trying to do this anonymously but oh well!!! Pic.twitter.com/T0dhRHyU66
— Tyler Perry (@tylerperry) December 6, 2018
Perry took to Twitter to announce his good deed, not so much to flaunt his generosity as to simply put it out there. He says it’s hard to keep anything anonymous these days (and he’s right), and noted that he was inspired by the recent story about an anonymous man who paid off an entire Walmart layaway department in Vermont.
“I know it’s hard times, a lot of people are struggling, and I’m just really, really grateful to be able to be in a position to this. So, God bless you, go get your stuff, merry Christmas,” Perry said in the video he posted to Twitter.
Technically, the items had to be in layaway before 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, Dec. 6. That’s the cutoff because that’s when Perry says he paid off the accounts.
A Walmart manager at the Douglasville location told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that while she’d seen good samaritans pay off the occasional account, she’d never seen anyone pay off the entire department in one go. “It shows that we know there’s still good people in the world,” she said.