Can you provide me some evidence that the OP’s quality of life is being seriously impaired by some idiot Asian bakery owners?
There’s a fairly deserved reputation for immigrant East Asians to ignore lines. You will never get your Banh Mi ordered unless you elbow your way to the front and scream your order. Check out the Yelp reviews for Banh Mi sandwich joints in Garden Grove. I suspect Asian bakeries are the same way.
That’s not the point. The point is that every incidence of illegal bigotry ought to be countered.
Seems like a store in such a situation could claim misunderstanding / confusion and it would be a convincing argument.
Yep. My thinking is that cultural cues(heh) involved are different. Waiting politely in line until the person concerned serves you is not how most Asian cultures approach the process of ordering. I’m an Indian and have seen it happen in Indian shops/restaurants quite often that a white person will politely wait while more assertive customers get served ahead of them, because they aren’t aware that queues simply don’t work the same way(or at all 
) in India. A recent immigrant working the counter could quite easily not be picking up the OP’s desire to order because the OP wasn’t signalling it in a familiar way. This could certainly imply poor service and training, but it’d take a lot stronger evidence for me to see racism.
Do you think a well-meaning passersby should call the police every time he sees a car going 5 miles over the speed limit?
Or would you agree that in some cases, even if a law is technically being violated, the costs and benefits are such that your time is better spend NOT going tio the law?
The two prioritised Asians could also have been either regulars, friends, family and/or part-owners.
There is no way to know for sure, given the sample size.
But I would place my bets on it being cultural. Lines are just not a thing in much of East Asia. It’s not a matter of ignoring lines or not respecting lines (though it may seem that way to people who’ve done it that way since pre-school). It’s that lines are not the way priority is determined.
Instead, you’d be expected to actively signal the staff (and often yelling is a perfectly acceptable way of doing this), go over to where they are, and even actively crowd other guests out of the way. If you are quietly hanging back, people are likely to assume that you are still deciding or that you are waiting for someone or something.
Think about it like getting a drink at a crowded bar- the bartender is going to wait for people to make active contact with them.
Another factor is that in much of Asia, one person typically orders for the group and picks up the bill on an outing. Ordering and paying individually is not done, ever. The idea of going. Dutch is exotic and amusing, and people are kind of shocked that it’s a real thing.
So if you guys were obviously together and your friend ordered and paid, they may have assumed the transaction for your group was over and you didn’t want to order for whatever reason.
By definition every incidence of illegal bigotry ought to be countered. That begs the question. Was it illegal bigotry? Was it bigotry at all? Who the hell knows? Maybe the people who were served first were regular customers. No problem with giving regulars some precedence.
What part of Asia are these people from, anyway? It’s a pretty big place.
I think you should definitely set up a website, print some leaflets, write to your congressman, and form a picket line outside the bakery shop for not serving you when you felt you should’ve been. It’s people like this that are the cause of all of the ills in this world and should be STOPPED. THIS. INSTANT.
Actually, the OP’s quality of life was just as seriously impared by some idiot Asian bakery owner as the Black/African Americans’ lives were back then by the malevolent whitey which denied them the service. That is why that part of the law (the link) was written. Just because there weren’t a whole phalanx of black people being denied service doesn’t preclude the impairment, neither the offense. His quality of life is just as valuable to him, I suspect, and to us as a society, as those who were denied in the deep South.
And, per your philosophy, can you provide evidence that ‘service’ as we understand the term, being denied the Blacks/African Americans of the US South were an impairment to their quality of life by some idiot American bakery owners?
Thank you for the first direct quote from the OP that I’ve seen in this thread. Why can’t others read as well as you???:smack:
Um, it’s not like that anymore. I don’t think any Asian person who lives in a city is going to think going Dutch is “exotic and amusing.” Sure, people still squabble over the bill, but plenty of restaurants in Seoul will split your bill without a second thought.
Also people know what a line is, and if you try to jump the queue you’re going to get yelled at.
It’s true that Asian people are less shy about getting the attention of the wait staff, and yelling (albeit politely) is perfectly acceptable. It may have been that the cashier thought that the OP was still making their mind up about what to order, but they still should have asked before serving the people that came later. That is normal behavior in most places in Korea (and Japan, from my experience).
I don’t know if the cashier is racist or not, but it’s silly to say that this is due to some cultural misunderstanding because East Asian cultures don’t do queues or don’t do Dutch pay. Maybe it’s still like that in rural China (which if I am remembering correctly is where most of your Asian experience comes from) but as an East Asian who has spent most of her life in an East Asian country, that’s not the norm I am accustomed to. Also, if you are running a business in a foreign country, it’s just rude to expect the natives of that country to understand or conform to your own cultural expectations. I would say the same if an American opened a restaurant in Korea and got mad when the customers yelled for the waiter. When in Rome and all that.
Because there was a whole society of people denying them adequate service? If it hadn’t been a widespread social problem, we wouldn’t have needed to pass a law.
Can you demonstrate that the Asian bakery owners is evidence of a widespread social problem?
No, it raises the question[s].
Good point. There is a lot of variation depending on where the shipowners are from. Lines and going Dutch definitely are not a thing much outside of the most cosmopolitan communities in China, and I’m pretty sure it’s similar in much of Southeast Asia.
I’ve had the opposite experience at a few ethnic places - I got waved ahead of the line and everyone seemed a bit tense until I left. :o I got the feeling they thought I was a government agent or something.
Maybe the other Asians at the OP’s restaurant were VIPs in their community and they were scared not to serve them first? 
I would just take it as a sign that they serve very authentic food.
I don’t consider this kind of minor discrimination as trivial. Something should be done about it—if that’s what it is. We on the boards here can’t really judge that without further information. But posting a Yelp review seems like a decent idea to me.
I for one would like to see this bakery’s Yelp page myself.