Making Sure This View Doesn’t Spread

My mom, my dad, and I are browsing in a department store. My parents strike up a conversation with a saleslady. School is about to start, so the saleslady starts talking about her kids and grandkids. During this conversation, she reveals she is an anti-vaxxer and has a doctor she bribed to get fake medical exemptions for her, her kids, and her grandkids.

I am livid, but I hold my tongue because Mom hates it when I “make a scene.” 

Instead, I went home and went right to the company’s website and wrote them a long email. I detailed the location, the department, the date, and the time, as well as telling them all about how this saleslady bragged about her fake medical exemptions and how she “won’t allow toxins to be pumped into her body.”

I did not, however, ask for her to be fired. What I said is that they should require all their employees to go through basic medical training, covering how to avoid illnesses, the importance of vaccines, and training in basic first aid and CPR. After all, they work with the public. Anything could happen where they’d need to do something to protect a customer or coworker. I also stated, “A salesperson is not a medical professional; they should not be giving customers unsolicited medical advice.”

I never heard from them. I just know that the next few times we went in, that saleslady wasn’t there. Instead, there were some new girls. 

Like many big-name department stores, this one also has a close-out store where they send all the bits and bobs they couldn’t sell at full price for as cheap as possible. While making yet another dry shopping run, we got one of the other salesladies we know well. We started talking and asked, politely, where the anti-vaxxer had been as we hadn’t seen her.

We were informed that she was transferred to the close-out store. Because this saleslady knew us so well, she lowered her voice and said, “We don’t know why, but that’s where the company sends you before firing you or trying to force you to quit.”