Comfort, joy and "paying ahead" for Marysville coffee customers

"Crazy," marveled Leonard Hooppaw, when a Starbucks barista explained — for the "gazillionth" time, she later estimated — that a stranger had prepaid his family's $13 drink order.

The scene at the Marysville store was even crazier a couple of hours earlier, when two Seattle television crews arrived within minutes of each other to document this good-news holiday story, which began unfolding around 8 a.m. Wednesday.

A regular customer with a well-established penchant for "paying ahead" for the vehicle behind her in the drive-through line had set off a chain reaction, fueled first by a cheerfully zealous barista and then reinforced by ever-expanding media coverage. By Thursday afternoon, more than 800 customers had joined the store's "chain of cheer."

News reporters collided with the newsmakers for a while, pressing microphones toward customers at the counter and aiming cameras through the windows of cars at the drive-through window.

In light of all this attention, what sort of Scrooge would take his free pumpkin-spice latte and run without passing on the cheer — as so many watched?

But the communal goodwill felt genuine, the enthusiasm truly contagious.

"Has anyone got her coffee yet?" called one driver, gesturing through the drive-up window toward KOMO correspondent Elisa Jaffe, who stood with a cameraman inside the store.

"She bought me a coffee. She said that's what God would want her to do," said Jaffe, who then donated $10 toward the bills of future customers. "It's so cool to have a happy story, with all the flooding and sadness."

Cynics have accused Starbucks of encouraging the pay-it-forward fad as a public-relations ploy, with a spate of incidents across the country in the past few weeks, but the Marysville phenomenon apparently was spontaneous. The woman who started it — store employees don't know her name, but they say she's probably in her 60s — drives a dark-blue minivan and drinks black iced tea. They say she usually inspires a few customers to follow suit.

But this time, barista Michael Smith, a freshman at the University of Washington, pushed it by encouraging drivers to keep the chain unbroken. Smith always is a sunny presence in the store, his co-workers say, dancing and singing and making people smile. This time, the smiles kept coming.

The store began keeping its extra pay-forward funds on a Starbucks holiday gift card, and it closed up shop Wednesday night with a positive balance and a tally of 386 consecutive "free" orders. When the first driver pulled up at 4:30 a.m. Thursday, the cycle continued with the offer of a free drink courtesy of the previous day's final customer.

Regular Racheal Chaudary says the store, in the Gateway Shopping Center off Interstate 5, is her favorite Starbucks because the staff is especially friendly. Wednesday, she was amazed when Smith told her the previous driver had paid for her $7.60 order — a drip coffee for her husband, her own mocha and some pound cake — and Smith asked her to be No. 120 in the chain.

The next customer was inside the store, and he walked over to call, "Thank you, thank you!" through the drive-up window, Chaudary said.

When she returned around midday Thursday, the tally had topped 700.

Elvis was crooning "Here Comes Santa Claus" over the store's sound system when Hooppaw and his family came through a short while later. His cellphone rang while they waited for their order — a pair of holiday lattes, a vanilla mocha and a hot chocolate, all for a $5 donation toward the next customer's order.

"It's a trippy thing," he told his friend on the phone, after explaining the scene.

After he hung up, he elaborated.

"There's not a whole lot of caring for people anymore. People don't do that," said Hooppaw, an aircraft mechanic.

And then he smiled.

"It's still out there."

Diane Brooks: 425-745-7802 or dbrooks@seattletimes.com