WHITE LAKE TOWNSHIP, Mich. — Walt Zerod was stocking frozen pizzas at a Meijer in Oakland County when a stranger asked him for the time. It was a simple enough question. Zerod pulled out his phone. The stranger moved his own phone close, played a sound like the Apple Pay chime and told Zerod he’d just taken $10 from him.

No money changed hands. The man was filming a prank. But he kept at it, and what he ended up recording was a working father telling him exactly why he didn’t think it was funny.

Zerod, a Red Baron delivery worker, initially told the man he was going to report him and walked away. The video cuts to another encounter near the checkout, where the man again brings up the money. By then, Zerod had had enough.

“My life is hard enough as it is,” he told him.

He had four kids at home who’d already gone to bed. He was supposed to have been home an hour earlier. He was worried about paying his mortgage, and he had to be up at 5 the next morning to get to 10 more stores. He told the man behind the camera that he was probably making money off the whole thing. It was a fair question to put to somebody who’d decided the frozen-food aisle was his stage.

The encounter happened in August, according to Zerod’s employer, but the video didn’t take off until late October. The original post was taken down, and copies kept circulating. One of the people who saw it was Luke Oakenshield of Arizona, who had never met Zerod. On Oct. 27, he started a GoFundMe on the Michigan dad’s behalf. By Oct. 30, donations had passed half a million dollars.

Zerod had worried aloud that the confrontation might get him kicked out of the store. Instead, his employer, Schwan’s, said it had checked on him after the incident and confirmed that he was still on the job. Red Baron put it a little less formally: “He’s still here. He’s got a fan club. Including us.”

The fundraiser ultimately showed $784,273 raised from roughly 22,800 donations. On Nov. 5, Zerod paused donations. He said he’d gotten to spend extra time at home with his family and had struck up a friendship with Oakenshield. He also said he wasn’t planning to give interviews. His family’s privacy came first.

If people still felt like giving, Zerod asked them to find another fundraiser, a local charity or a church helping families through the holidays. The night the video was filmed, what he wanted was to get home to his kids. Now he had a little more time with them, and he wanted somebody else to catch a break.