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upworthy

pizzeria shares profits

via Rockstar Pizza / Facebook

Rockstar Pizza in Brownsburg, Indiana has a beautiful holiday tradition. For the past five years, on Christmas Day, its owners, Colby and Ron Mathews give all the day's profits to its staff.

This year, the seven employees who volunteered to work on Christmas all received over $700 for working a short shift. But during that time they worked really, really hard.

The staff had planned on working the dinner shift from 4 pm to 9 pm, but the phone started blowing up early.


"They always do well, but this year it really caught on, and they had a huge turnout this year," Colby told TODAY Food. "At 3:00, the phone started going crazy ... and finally, at 6:30 [the staff] called us and asked, 'Is there any way we can turn off the phones, because we have 60 orders to make.'

At 6:30 the staff had to shut off the phones because they couldn't handle all the orders.

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via Rockstar Pizza / Facebook

Every year the Christmas tradition brings in extra customers but this year things really exploded. "They make a lot more than I could ever bless them with as a bonus," Colby explained. "It ended up being a really good night."

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The Mathews' donate all of the supplies and ingredients for Christmas Day and don't touch a dollar of the profits.

"They worked hard, and they earned it," Colby said. "They earned every dollar of it, and for some of them, it's a very big deal and can make a big difference to make that amount of money in that short a time."

Here's this year's Facebook post.

The Rockstar Pizza Christmas tradition is a win-win for everyone involved. The Mathews get to give back to their employees, the employee receive a much-needed Christmas bonus, and the community gets to help out and eat some tasty pizza pie at the same time.

It's also a great example of what the holiday is all about.

The community's overwhelming response to the Christmas tradition shows how much people love to support businesses and business owners who care about their employees. Let's hope this story serves as a lesson for others businesses out there.