Sometimes it feels like I was born in the wrong era. I’d love to have marched with suffragists at the turn of the last century, campaigned for better labor conditions in 1930s factories, or helped stage sit-ins on college campuses in the 1960s. Oh, I’ve participated in my share of marches and worked for many causes. But I always yearned to do something more dramatic … until an unlikely hero reminded me you don’t have to start a revolution to make a difference.

“Johnny” was exceptional … but not in a way that usually suggests leadership qualities. He had Down Syndrome, and working as a grocery bagger for a Midwestern supermarket chain was likely as far as his skills would take him.  One day several years ago, Johnny’s employers invited speaker and author Barbara Glanz to address their company’s 3,000 workers on improving customer service. Young Johnny was so motivated by Glanz’s speech, he decided to make it his mission to build up the customers with whom he interacted. With his dad’s help, he began searching for inspirational thoughts that he’d copy, cut out, and quietly slip into customers’ grocery bags each day.

 Gaining converts

Johnny’s personal outreach program came to light when his store manager asked customers why they were lined up at one aisle while other registers stood idle. They confessed they didn’t mind waiting to get one of Johnny’s notes. One woman even shared that she’d gone from rarely shopping at the store to finding reasons to stop in almost every day.

Before long, a guy in the meat market started buying Peanuts stickers for his customers’ meat purchases. An employee in the floral department began turning broken flowers into corsages and giving them to female shoppers. By quietly reaching out to the people he encountered, this lone grocery bagger managed to inspire everyone in the store to be friendlier to customers and to their colleagues. Sales increased. And eventually word got back to Barbara Glanz.

Glanz included the story in her 1996 book Care Packages for the Workplace. And through the years, so many people have asked about this exceptional young man that she’s developed Johnny the Bagger®: A True Story of Customer Service—a motivational film and training program for sharing his story and its lessons with other organizations.

Johnny proved you don’t have to be Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or Martin Luther King Jr. to make your world a better place. You just have to be willing to do something.