One of Home Depot’s core values is “doing the right thing.” The company explains it as exercising “good judgment by ‘doing the right thing’ instead of just ‘doing things right.’ We strive to understand the impact of our decisions, and we accept responsibility for our actions.”
The value is so important that it is written on all of its employees’ work vests.
There’s no better example of employees following the company’s values than an incident that happened late last month at a Home Depot store in Bellevue, Tennessee. This story was originally reported by WSMV in Nashville, Tennessee, and we thought it was such a good deed that we wanted to share it far and wide through our Upworthy audience.
Home Depot employee Adam Adkisson was walking down aisle 22, where you can find insulation and ladders, when he noticed a small envelope. “I didn’t think anything of it at first. I thought it was empty, but I thought I’d go back to make sure and when I picked it up, I could feel that It had stuff in it. It had money,” Adkisson told WSMV.
When he opened the envelope, he realized it was stuffed with $700 cash.
Adkisson did the right thing and turned the envelope in to a manager. At the end of the day, the closing manager, Alissa Rocchi, noticed that no one had come by to claim the missing money. So she took to Facebook and posted about the missing envelope, leaving out key details that would have to be filled in by the owner to prove it was theirs.
She could have just left it in the safe at work and gone on with her life, but she went out of her way to find the person who lost the money. That’s definitely “doing the right thing.”
Luckily, the Facebook post caught the attention of the owner’s partner, who reached out to her via messenger.
“I got a message from a gentleman by the name of Mark who said that’s my partner’s. It’s his money. He lost it. He is panicking,” Rocchi said. He was able to identify the envelope by describing some important details that were scrawled on the back.
“I was stressing over it pretty bad. So, I am glad that he is a social media guy and was able to see that because I would have never seen it,” Johnathon Clayton, the owner of the lost envelope, said. It’s important that he got it back because he was planning on using the money to buy Christmas gifts for his kids.
After getting his money back, Clayton went to the store and personally thanked Adkisson for his good deed and gave him a small reward. Adkisson should sleep well knowing that his good deed meant that Clayton’s children will have a merrier Christmas.
Rocchi says that it’s all part of the company’s core values to “do the right thing.”
“Our core value is on our chest and one of our core values says to do the right thing. That is just us living our core values,” Rocchi said.
