The Deli Man Who Turns Report Cards Into $100 Bills

The “Islandock” brand behind Grades for Grabs

Image courtesy of the Inspire Academic Excellence with Islandock GoFundMe campaign

On report-card mornings in Port Richmond, Staten Island, the line outside Zack’s Finest Deli & Grocery can stretch down Heberton Avenue before the store even opens — kids in backpacks, some of them driven in from Pennsylvania or Oklahoma, all clutching the same thing: a report card.

Behind the counter is Wail Alselwi, a Yemeni immigrant who runs the store with his family. His own path to that counter wasn’t easy. He’d already lost one deli, in the Bronx, when the pandemic forced it to close in 2022. He started over on Staten Island — and in 2023, a twelve-year-old named Zameir Davis walked in and showed him an honor-roll report card, half as a joke, half as a dare. Alselwi handed him a reward on the spot. Someone filmed it. The video went viral, and “Grades for Grabs” was born.

The rules are simple and, deliberately, about progress rather than perfection. A student whose grades are below an 80 average still walks out with something — usually about $10 in store snacks. Cross 90, and it’s a bigger moment: snacks, a custom T-shirt, and a $100 bill pulled straight from the register. Alselwi has said the point isn’t to reward only the top of the class, but to notice the kids who are trying and improving, and to make that effort feel like it matters to someone.

It started as a one-man operation, paid for out of Alselwi’s own pocket. It didn’t stay that way. His brother, Nash, designed “Islandock” merchandise and helped launch a GoFundMe, “Inspire Academic Excellence with Islandock,” to keep the rewards coming as word spread. The campaign has raised more than $590,000 from nearly 13,000 donors as of this writing — funding that Alselwi says goes toward the cash prizes, snacks, merchandise, and, most recently, school supplies. In September 2026, he expanded the effort into a supply giveaway that grew from seven boxes on its first day to sixty-five boxes in a single afternoon, reaching more than 3,000 students.

The scale of it now is hard to picture from behind a deli counter. During marking periods, 300 to 400 kids have lined up outside Zack’s Finest in a single day. Alselwi’s TikTok account, where the moments of kids opening report cards and getting handed cash still play out on camera, has drawn more than a million followers. In 2024, Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella presented Alselwi and Davis — the boy whose report card started it all — with certificates of appreciation for what had grown out of that first viral clip.

Ask Alselwi why he keeps doing it, at a scale that now costs him hours of his day and a line out his door, and the answer traces back to Yemen. His wife and three daughters still live there; he visits when he can, and says bringing them to the U.S. permanently is his biggest dream. “When they come, I see my own kids in them,” he has said of the students who show up with their report cards. It’s a plain explanation for something that has become, almost by accident, one of the more visible acts of everyday generosity in New York City — a shopkeeper who left one country and rebuilt a life in another, now spending part of every school year making sure kids two generations younger than him know that someone is paying attention to their effort.

Grades for Grabs isn’t a registered nonprofit, and there’s no school district or outside organization running it alongside him — it’s still, at its core, one man, his family, and a deli counter. What started as a dare from a twelve-year-old has become something far bigger than either of them expected: proof that a single small business, and the person willing to stand behind its register, can turn showing up with a better grade into an occasion worth celebrating.