Welcome to Good Turns

Celebrating the spirit of generosity and the good turns strangers do for each other every day

Welcome to TurnTo’s Good Turns blog! At TurnTo, we make it easy for shoppers to give each other advice, through services that let people post reviews of items they’ve purchased, answer each other’s questions, and post photos, among other things. (To learn more about our products, click here.)

But why do perfect strangers take the time to share what they’ve learned with each other? Helping people make better purchasing decisions may seem like a small gesture, but we think people do it for the same reason they perform any act of kindness — because the instinct to help when you can — just because you can — lives inside each one of us.

To celebrate this spirit, we’ll be featuring noteworthy good turns, and the people who do them, each week on this new blog. These will be stories from every context and all walks of life, from the smallest of helping hands to the grandest of gestures.

If you’ve ever been on either end of a good deed, or know anyone who has, we want to hear from you!

We’ve all heard tales of the wallet returned with all its cash and credit cards intact, and a lot of us have been on one end or the other of a transaction like that. Many people go to much more trouble to help others, with little thought of what they’ll get out of the transaction themselves. Sometimes these are intentional acts, planned and extensively supported; sometimes they’re spur-of-the-moment kindnesses that were only made possible by the forces of serendipity. We’ll write about all of those and more, and where possible we’ll feature interviews with the people involved. You might even read about the perfect online review or piece of advice that helped someone make just the right purchase at just the right time.

Who knows, you might even see your story here. If you’ve ever been on either end of such a good deed, or know anyone who has, we want to hear from you! Send us your tales of good deeds and the kindness of strangers (especially if we can get in touch with the people involved) at goodturns@turnto.com and we’ll see if we can get them on the blog.

We hope these stories will bring sunshine into your day and that you will share them with others. And we hope that by celebrating good turns we can encourage more of them, and perhaps make our world a little bit better place for all of us. Call it our own good turn.

And if this blog inspires you, please let us know.

Posted November 23, 2016