Doughnut shop sells out after owner’s son tweets empty store is making dad sad

When Billy By saw his dad’s new doughnut shop was struggling to bring in punters, he turned to social media to try to encourage some friends to stop by.

“My dad is sad cause no one is coming to his new donut shop,” he wrote on Twitter, with images of the empty store and its suitably morose looking owner.

The call for customers at the Texas cafe, which went out on Saturday, worked better than he possibly could have imagined.

It gained more than a million combined likes and retweets, and even caught the eye of Twitter staff themselves, who tweeted about it from the site’s own official account.

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On Sunday it was a very different story at Billy’s Donuts, which is named after Billy himself, as customers queued out of the door at the store in Missouri City.

Billy returned to Twitter to let everyone know they had sold out of doughnuts and kolaches.

He wrote: “Just wanted to update yall! We completely sold out of donuts and kolaches! You are all amazing. I can’t thank everyone enough for coming out and supporting local businesses. This means so much to my family.”

To make things even sweeter for those who got their hands on the treats, representatives from Twitter paid for the lot.

And it was a similar story on Monday, as the store sold out again – although the customers actually had to pay for their doughnuts on this occasion.