Sorry! She Forgot It’s Not The 1950s!
I am an assistant manager at a pharmacy. We’re just a few blocks from a small retirement community, so we have quite a few senior citizen customers.
I have just finished a midnight shift and I am getting ready to leave when one of our elderly regulars wheels a cart full of merchandise to the front register. I have spoken to this particular customer many times, and she has always been very courteous, even going so far as to bring us baked goods around the holidays.
The cashier who’s working today is one of our best employees. He always goes out of his way to be nice to our customers, and he is mentioned by name on customer service surveys several times a week. He is Black, which is relevant to what’s about to happen.
Loss prevention has a very strict guideline that the register has to be manned at all times, so the cashiers are supposed to call another employee if a customer needs help finding something.
The cashier is about halfway through scanning this woman’s order.
Customer: “Do you have any more of the cases of water that are on sale?”
Cashier: “I’m not sure, but I can have someone check for you.”
He starts to call for someone on the intercom, but since I am right there, I say:
Me: “I’ll check for you!”
I head for the stockroom. As soon as I turn away from the register, I hear the customer speak in a very loud and angry voice.
Customer: “Why can’t you go look, you lazy f****** [N-word]?”
I freeze for a few seconds. I’ve heard plenty of racial slurs growing up in a rural area, but they’ve usually been whispered, and only after the speaker made sure the coast was clear. I’d never heard someone go full pre-Civil Rights Deep South before.
Then, I come back to life.
Me: “You need to leave.”
Customer: “What? No! I need my stuff!”
Me: “No. You have been asked to leave, so now you are trespassing. If you don’t leave immediately, I will call the police.”
She finally leaves, but not before she tells us that she is going to get both of us fired.
Sure enough, she calls the corporate office and complains. I have already emailed the district manager and the regional vice president in anticipation because I know she will leave out the racial slur from her complaint.
That leads to the most awkward conference call in history. The cashier, store manager, and I are on the call with [District Manager] and [Vice President]. [Vice President] says, in the most uncomfortable voice I have ever heard:
VP: “So, it’s, um… my understanding that she called you the, uh… the N-word?”
Cashier: “No, she called me a n***er.”
Talk about tension you could cut with a knife.
To their credit, corporate actually banned the woman from the store. That surprised me because brick-and-mortar retailers are so desperate for customers that they’ll tolerate all manner of despicable behavior to keep a customer from giving their business to a competitor.
I never had to enforce the ban because the customer never came back. In a way, that made her an even grosser excuse for a human being. If she came back and tried to shop like nothing had happened, then her outburst might have been attributed to a moment of senility, but the fact that she never came back tells me she knew what she said and how horrible it was.