A Whataburger Customer Gave The Lady At The Drive Thru A $10,000 Mink Coat

‘Tis the season for kindness and generosity toward strangers, absolutely. And sometimes that kindness and generosity toward strangers is a bit more, shall we say, random and weird than other times.

Take, for example, the story of a woman who, while in Liberty (between Houston and Beaumont) last week, drove thru the local Whataburger while picking up breakfast. This woman—identified by ABC 13 only as “Nadine”—was passing through in her $10,000 mink coat when the woman working the window, Cheryl Semien, complimented her on her style. Moments later, Nadine removed the coat, slid it through the window, and told Semien that if she liked it so much, she should keep it.

Cheryl Semien said a customer handed her a Mink coat after she paid the woman a compliment. The generosity happened Wednesday on Semien’s birthday. She told us she was at work at the Whataburger on US 90 in Liberty around 10 AM when the customer pulled up to the drive-thru window.

“She was a perfect stranger, I didn’t know this lady from nowhere,” said Semien. “I didn’t see her come through my drive-thru window as long as I’ve been at Whataburger for nine years.”

We tracked down the woman, behind the kind gesture. After some convincing, Nadine agreed to speak with Eyewitness News. She did not want her last name used, and said she simply did what felt right. Nadine revealed the coat is worth around $10,000.

We’re fans of the wealthy and deeply eccentric here, and there’s little to not like about the encounter between Nadine and Cheryl Semien, who—if the TV news footage of her luxuriating in her extravagant coat is any indication—clearly adores her gift. The fact that it happened to occur on Semien’s birthday is the sort of happy coincidence that adds another touch of pleasantness to an already-pleasant story.

This time of year is usually full of stories of generous, kindhearted people sharing their good fortune with others, but few of those stories are this eccentric. Most of the time, they involve, say, a check being delivered to someone in dire straits, or a whole bunch of presents being passed out to the kids at the youth shelter, or a fabulous turkey dinner being served up to lonely widowers. Certainly there are more functional uses for $10,000 than a mink coat (fun-fact: each mink coat requires as many as 65 minks to make!), but if Nadine had offered Semien such generosity in a more practical form, the story wouldn’t be half as charming. Sometimes, this is the Christmas spirit, too: Delivering something unnecessary and lovely to a stranger simply because they seem to like it more than you do, and then driving off with your taquitos in tow, ready for the next adventure.