This is the feel-good story of 31-year-old Canadian man Colin Ross, who was looking for a hangover cure last Saturday when he stumbled upon a fish and chips restaurant called Whitbie's in Lethbridge, Alberta. After being "blown away" by both his halibut meal and the lack of customers inside of the restaurant when he ate, Ross made it his mission to support the restaurant owner, according to a harrowing tale recounted by BuzzFeed Canada.
"I just came in and walked in the door and saw this old guy just sitting there in a chair," Ross told BuzzFeed Canada of the restaurant owner, a 69-year-old Scottish immigrant named John McMillan. "There wasn't another soul in the place."
So Ross, who works in marketing, decided to ask McMillan if there was a way he could help boost business. McMillan "sloughed [him] off" at first (as if all of this wasn't already the most Canadian thing you've ever heard, Whitbie's is right behind a Tim Horton's), but Ross insisted and eventually settled on putting up a Facebook post about Whitbie's to try and help save the shop.
"He can't even pay himself at the end of the day," Ross wrote in his lengthy post on Facebook, which he used to ask his friends to patronize Whitbie's. "So that really bothered me." And Ross's digital plea to draw customers to Whitbie's paid off, with the restaurant reportedly seeing up to 500 customers per day for several days and lines stretching out the door. It was the biggest crowd McMillan has seen in the seven years Whitbie's has been open. Ross' post was eventually shared more than 8,000 times, and McMillan couldn't have been more grateful for it.
“The last three months here have been absolutely horrible, just horrible...We just got crashed yesterday," McMillan told Canada's Global News. "He did it out of the goodness of his heart and Lethbridge came and did it out of the goodness of their hearts."
