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CANADA — A bank in Canada gave personalized thank yous to customers all over Canada through an ATM — an “Automated Thanking Machine.”
Go ahead and grab some preemptive tissues, this may make you shed a tear or two.
Canadian bank TD Canada Trust initiated a campaign to simultaneously thank an estimated 30,000 customers across 1,100 branches on July 25, 2014. At exactly 2 p.m. EST, the bank gave each of their customers $20 in person or deposited directly into their accounts, according to the bank’s press release. That’s means the bank gave about $600,000 to its customers.
"A thank you can change someone's day, so that's why we have been surprising our customers across Canada, to say 'TD Thanks You'," said Tim Hockey, TD Canada Trust president and CEO, in the release.
But the thank yous didn’t stop there. Some customers received personalized — and in some cases substantial — thank yous organized by local branch employees for their local customers.
One woman simply received flowers; another woman received $2,000 total to start educational savings accounts for her two kids as well as tickets to take them to Disneyland; one man received a personalized jersey and other gear from the Toronto Blue Jays then turned around and met Blue Jays’ right fielder José Bautista who then told the man that he would be throwing out the first pitch at a Blue Jays' game; and another woman received tickets to Trinidad to see her daughter who just had surgery as part of her cancer treatment.
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The Canadian airline WestJet decided to make Christmas wishes of weary travelers come true."It was incredible to see the look of surprise on our customers' faces," said Ester Condello, a branch manager.
While we don’t see all the thank yous dispensed by the ATM machine, you can tell by the looks on the faces and the emotions in the voices of the recipients that their surprises mean something special to them.
The bank’s thank-you campaign follows in the generous footsteps of fellow Canadian company, WestJet, which ran a gift-giving campaign during Christmas 2013.
