Free enterprise.

Late last year, Robert Kern, 81, sold his share of the ownership of Generac Power Systems Inc., a Waukesha, Wisconsin, company, and retired as the company's chairman. Mr. Kern and his wife, Patricia, have been philanthropists for some time and had established a charitable foundation, and so it might be expected that they would do good with their profits. They didn't disappoint. They apparently decided to use their personal funds from the sale of the company to reward those who had made the company a success over the years.

Shortly before Christmas, employees started receiving some rather large checks in the mail from Mr. and Mrs. Kern personally, not the company. Though no one knows for sure the formula the Kerns used, the amounts appear to have been based on each employee's length of service. George Plehn, who worked at Generac for 19 years, received a check for $31,000.

"My jaw dropped when I saw" the check in the mail, Plehn told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "This was a huge amount of money for something that wasn't really necessary."

Another employee, Jeff Dries, worked at the company for nine years and received a check for about $10,000. "People had gone home for lunch and checked their mail like they normally do," Dries told the Journal Sentinel. "They just got broadsided."

Gordon Seefeldt, a 17-year Generac employee, described Mr. Kern as a generous man with a strong sense of what makes a company prosper. "He has always maintained that the longtime faithful employees have been responsible for his success," Seefeldt explained.

Brian Thompson, who had worked at Generac for only six weeks, still received $500, which pleased him. He shared his high opinion of his employer with the newspaper: "A lot of companies do a really good job of promoting themselves and building up their image. But this is more than that. It's not fake."