Inspired by my experiences of shops who won’t do business with, let’s just say 'non-asians, I can kind of understand their side. People from different cultures can have different expectations than people from your own culture, and that can lead to headaches all around, and a general feeling that, in the end, doing business with people you are not familiar with is just not worth the trouble. I just wonder whether I’d ever get to that point of exasperation. I guess it would depend on the type of trouble you repeatedly experienced. For the point of this exercise, lets say that the trouble usually manifests itself as an inability of the “X-type” customer to understand the common, everyday rules of trade in your locale. Rules that everyone else understands as a matter of course.
So dopers, would you ever get to the (ballsy) point of refusing to sell to “those types”?
N.B.
I’d rather people not get bogged down on "what do you mean by “race”? - lets just say you, as a shop owner, take a quick glance and make a determination “them’s us/them’s not us”, which proves to be accurate enough around 90% of the time.
Let’s also assume that, where you live, there’s no legal repercussions of refusing to sell goods/services to people based on how they look.
I think that for a long while I would just trudge on and hope that they’re getting educated and learning something new from me.
I would probably have no problem throwing out ANYbody that was actually disrupting the business or disturbing the customers overly-much with their ritual “Let’s haggle the Tunisian way-in DANCE!”.
Or whatever else was overly annoying.
I don’t know if this is exactly what you mean, but something similar happened at my former job. That company was poorly run. The owners decided to not to international sales or domestic sales with people of a certain race. They claimed with due to two things. One, these people were making counterfits. Two, many of the international orders from the countries they stopped working with would come back in poor condition. It looked like these people were using the product (and perhaps making counterfit items) then returning them.
I would try to judge individuals as individuals and not based on what race they are from.
For example let’s say I rent apartments and 5 times in a row I lease to a young black male who ends up being involved in drugs, trashes the apartment and causes all kinds of trouble. The 6th one I just reject out of hand. Well, that’s wrong regardless of the hypothetical legal situation.
Of course in a rental situation of any kind you can do a large degree of investigation before agreeing to anything (you are allowed to do a background, credit check and etc–which would quickly identify a gang banger and make him look very different as an potential tenant than the 6th young black male who is actually an upstanding citizen.)
I can see scenarios where through repeated exasperation this might not work. Imagine someone from Southeast Asia who owns a restaurant in a medium sized city that is mostly devoid of any non-mainstream American restaurants. Let’s also say that this particular brand of Southeast Asian has a moderate sized minority community in town. The restaurant is super popular in that community because it is the only place those people have in town to eat restaurant-grade authentic food from their culture. White people regularly come in and cause problems because something about the food or the way it is served is totally at odds with what they expect or demand from the restaurant experience. They get angry, rude, refuse to pay, etc. I can see where maybe that person would want to just ban white people.
I think a more respectable tract might be (again this is a hypothetical with no laws) keep the menu in the local language only, let anyone eat there, but provide no translation services whatsoever. That would probably dramatically increase the chances that any white people who actually came in and ordered would be informed enough about your culture to not cause problems. [Of course in real situations like this in America the minority restaurateur has a non-advertised menu available for people actually raised in that culture, that usually will be written in the native language. The restaurant’s main fare tends to be heavily Americanized or if authentic kept mostly to stuff acceptable to Americans.]
Race isn’t enough, it’s culture/subculture that I might have a problem with. In other words, it would make sense to avoid doing business in Greece if you can avoid it given how corrupt their economy is at the moment - I don’t want to have to bribe surgeons to do their jobs. But that doesn’t mean I’ll avoid some shop run by a Greek guy here in California. After all, not only is corruption not genetic, but he may well have moved here specifically to get away from all that.
Well, most of my business is with white people because I live in the Midwest and they are quite abundant.
I’m up to 3,148 bad experiences but I’m not yet ready to give up on them. It may because some of them are downright adorable and they look a lot like me.
I own a small business. Over the years there have been many people I’ve decided to no longer do business with. The racial profile of this group mirrors the racial profile of my customer base, which mirrors the racial profile of my community.
I live in area with a very heavy foreign presence, and there are tons of Korean restaurants around. If the name of the restaurant is entirely in Korean, and there is no name in latin letters around, I see that as code for “your kind isn’t welcome here.”
That wouldn’t make sense, it would have to be based on who the person was. There are certain tendencies that each race has as their “own” but most of them aren’t offenses that would cause me to stop doing business with them.
That’s where tendencies does NOT equal statistics. For instance, statistics of black vs. white men in jail doesn’t make me think “oh, black male, he might be a robber”. What might make me look askance would be “young male (any race), dressed in full thug costume, angry eyes, jerky potentially threatening movements” etc.
Could just be a kid who has horrible fashion sense and/or is a slave to peer pressure, and who just had a fight with his girlfriend or parents. But I WILL be keeping a sharp eye on him, and make an escape plan.
Pretty much this. I also live in a neighborhood with many Koreans and some of the stores in the nearest shopping center have their names entirely in Korean. I always took it as pretty much saying that they only want to serve people who can relate to that culture. That said, I’ve been in places like that, but it’s typically been when someone of that particular culture has invited me.
Anyway, I don’t see any reason to discriminite explicitly based upon how some people look unless specifically targetting a certain group. Sure, you might get some stereotypical person of a particular race who feels that he ought to be able to haggle with you or expect some sort of additional service or whatever, but it doesn’t make sense to assume that everyone that looks like that will behave that way. You will still see them coming in and have to deal with them in some capacity, so why immediately shut down rather than give them a fair shot?
True, but when it circulated that our new (black) mayor, Mr. Han**cock **(hahahahahahaahahahaha) is ‘supposedly’ a patron of a busted prostitute ring, my first thought was, “He’s black from the gh…” (the owners were club owners and the joint was called “Players”) and then I thought, “WTF! :smack: You’re a jerk, JoyAnn!” and felt guilty.
