Because she was a customer and corporate normally doesn’t care what the staff has to tolerate as long as the company can’t be sued for it.
Odds are they they vigorously defended themselves as having done nothing wrong and used an unfortunate word or two in the process. Company went “ok, here’s our problem” and cleaned house.
But that’s mere speculation.
Do all they work for Jim Crow’s Furniture Mart now?
Again, this hasn’t been my experience. Corporate did not expect us to tolerate a long laundry list of customer behaviors. Profanity, racist comments, sexist comments, drunk customers, high customers, violent customers, yelling customers (yes, I kicked a guy out who wouldn’t stop yelling) etc. etc. If a customer was a problem, they were shown the exit.
I like that his driving buddy was asked to deliver the appliance with another white driver in place of Bradley, and his buddy said, “Nope.”
It’s sad that the managers couldn’t see how bad this was.
Because people don’t like to think they are racists, so they identify racism as only the most overt kind, like a klan member burning a cross. By belittling the critics who are pointing out the low-level, but obvious racism of Hilarity, they are also creating enough space for their own low-level racism not to be viewed as such.
Well if I am an obvious low-level racist, how about all those black people in the waiting room of the black doctor? Are they racist?
Note that I didn’t say I would refuse to be treated by any particular person. I said that when I was picking a doctor I had certain preferences. So does everybody. Mine just happens to be, for an everyday GP/GYN, a female doctor. So now I’m a low-level racist because I would have a slight preference for someone of my own race over someone of another race.
First your preference was for doctors who aren’t your friends, now it’s for females. I’m not sure you’ve really grokked this “racism” thing.
If they picked that black doctor BECAUSE the doctor was black? Duh, YES!
I think that would be obvious.
When it comes to a female, laying nude on a examination table with her feet in the stirrups and her holy of holies smiling at the world, I can imagine I’d be pretty selective about who stuck what up my hairy goblet too. For any other treatment the luck of the draw would do just fine.
But then, I’m just a male who learned that female nurse practitioners don’t understand that testing a male for testicular cancer shouldn’t require making him grimace in pain. I can easily understand a woman preferring a woman’s touch for certain things.
Hey, you just have to drink from that water fountain over there, which is closer not this one. What are you complaining about, anyway?
It’s pretty funny to see all the posts about how the guy could maybe be fired for not being a racist, when in fact he was fired for being a racist - or caving into a racist, at least. Given social media today I can’t conceive that Lowe’s would have done anything different.
The problem can be seen from the headline of the first cited article - “Lowe’s Allegedly Replaced Black Delivery Driver With White Man To Accommodate Racist Customer” - not idiot Lowe’s manager did this.
Former retail managers - who I trust more than some people here - would it have been better to give the driver a choice of what he wanted to do - making sure he knew his decision would be supported either way - or rejecting the order or kicking it upstairs?
*66 The Data Use Of the Beast
Regarding doctors & choice - white male here: I’ll go to anyone and have been rewarded for doing so.
A few years ago, after I had moved and had not yet acquired a primary care physician I had a kidney stone. I went to a 24 hour clinic which gave me a mild painkiller and assigned me to follow up with a local doctor. Upon seeing the name, Dr Villalobos, I had some initial reservations.
However I found Dr Linda Villalobos of Fredericksburg VA to be one of the kindest, most patient physicians I have ever met, and I was lucky to have met her.
Having moved again I have another woman PCP and I’m thrilled with her work too.
I’m glad your experience in retail has been much better than mine. I have had managers that did not care if the staff were called racists or sexists terms or did not care if customers threatened to attack and/or rape the staff in the parking lot. On the occasions that employees were actually attacked by customers, management tried to hush it up, usually by first threatening the employee with termination and negative rumors about them to other potential employees. There are a lot of rat-bastards in management.
As a matter of fact, unlike probably most people here, I did have a black female doctor for about four years, and the only reason I left her practice was because I moved to another state.
My point here is that preferences in doctors is not like preferences in delivery people. I don’t think you really grokked that, or much of anything, but perhaps I’m not explaining it well.
So: If a person in a retail establishment wants a certain kind of sales person or delivery person because of racial or any other preferences, fuck them, they can go somewhere else or do without. But if it’s a doctor, their preference should be accommodated, and at the hospital where I worked, it was. Yeah, there were some people who didn’t want to be treated by an Indian doctor. So the choice was, find them another doctor, or they leave, and maybe die (heart patient BTW). So yeah, we found another doctor for the person. In fairness to the patient involved, the first doctor was a little hard to understand, and in a doctor-patient relationship that can be important. I don’t think that was the whole story, but what are you gonna do, let the heart patient walk out of the ER and collapse on the pavement outside? The hospital really didn’t like people dying in its ER.
That’s a good point. I think you’re probably right.
Perhaps we should dispatch with the whole argument about the manager…
As a former appliance department Supervisor who later became a manager who oversaw the appliance department and delivery team, my answer would be “no” I wouldn’t give the driver the choice to say “It’s okay, I’ll skip this delivery, you can let someone else take it.” I would have told him “no, nobody is going to be making this delivery at this point.”
If the customer wanted to take it up with corporate I would be confident my decision was correct and my job was secure.
192.168.6.66, the Router of the Beast
Why did you “have some reservations”?
So, if it’s something relatively unimportant like delivering a package, or mopping the the floors it’s ok if a darkie does it? But when it comes to something weighty, like looking at your snatch, its best for a white person to handle it? 'This is just some sort of i’mnotracistbecausemymaidisblack type of ridiculous reasoning to me.
Racism is treating someone different because their race. It’s not complicated, you are preferring that the doctor that is treating you is white. You don’t care about eye color, hair color, height - but you do care about one physical attribute - skin color.
To me this is among the most incipient kind of racism. It is the racism of the hiring manager who has nothing against black people, and has black friends - or at least one token black friend, but just prefers a white job candidate, because “you know how it is, I have nothing against black people - its just this other candidate is a better ‘fit’ … ,” but then wonders why so many black people fail to achieve. It’s the racism in jury pools that tips the scales of justice just ever so slightly towards conviction.
And I think racists like you are far more dangerous than some old woman in Southern Virginia. You’re educated, you are in a professional environment. But somehow racism doesn’t fit into your view of yourself and your world because you are just so much better and sophisticated a person than those dumb people down South - especially that idiot store manager.
And that brings me back to an earlier point. Many people in this thread keep trying to tell me it’s simple, the manager is just an idiot. Are you going to tell me that this manager really exists in a world so vastly different than what you are seeing here? Are the managers above him, the community around him and the rest of his customers so enlightened as to be completely color blind? I have trouble believing that. Most likely the only thing that was unusual in this situation that a little daylight was spread into the dark corners of how things really are in America, and an easy scapegoat was found in the “idiot” retail manager. Nothing happens to the managers above him, the old lady gets her appliance, one anonymous manger is back on the job market - and all is right with the world.
Really, to make racism simple for you to understand - the only thing that being racist requires is treating people differently based upon their race. It doesn’t require one to be a generally bad, stupid or uneducated. It can exist within smart, educated and “nice” people; but it is something those unwilling to look will never see.