All of you saying that the manager would have been left out to dry and get fired if he had refused to deliver old hag’s appliance are just being obtuse. This is motherfucking LOWES we are discussing here. A pretty damn big corporation. Like most of corporate America they are going to default to whatever does NOT cater to a racist viewpoint.
At one point in my early career I managed the three local retail stores for one of the national wireless companies. Transfer this Lowes scenario into one of my stores, and you can be sure a shift manager who did not allow the customer to force their racism on my employees would not have been fired, he/she would have been praised.
No she would not do that necessarily. What she would do is call corporate and tell them that the service was bad for some other reason, or lie, or come up with some version of events that paints the manager in a bad light. And it’s anyone’s guess how corporate would view this situation. This is the reality of working in retail.
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Thank god I’ll probably never have to work in retail again.
The problem is proving who said what. I have no doubt that if the proof of how the interaction went down that Lowe’s would side with the manager, but lacking that it’s a this person said that that person said this situation.
The manager showed really poor judgement in caving to the customer’s demands. So I lean towards firing him.
But I also think that he would have been the goat if, denying service to the customer, the comapny had had to find fault somewhere.
He was screwed no matter what he did. But if I was the manager for a competing company and had a manager’s job available, I’d not have hired him because of the decision he made. I would consider hiring him if he’d taken a moral stand and refused the bigoted customer service.
Anyone remember the KFC incident? Anyone remember the reactions on the internet, even the the SDMB in reaction to that event which actually did not happen. I can pull up half a dozen threads that show how even our generally liberal leaning dopers feel about retail people, and how quick they are to judge them and be prejudiced against them.
Now just take this, and apply it to the more likely than not un-liberal leaning upper management of a given large retail establishment and the reason why many of us feel the manager would have been screwed may start to become more apparent.
Many people on the Straight Dope have had the unpleasant experience of working retail and dealing with corporate or upper management. Too often corporate will cater to ridiculous and humiliating requests by customers.
Oh, Hell, I am totally busted! :o (how did you know?) Racist old bats and incompetent delivery managers have always been kind of a thing for me. I mean, like one at a time is even good. Put them both in the same story…? (fap-fap-fap-fap-fap)
Driver was called back to the store and told he couldn’t do the old cunt’s delivery. Why? Black. Because Black, that’s why. But I suppose Black people should just be used to that kind of shit, right?
This is not complicated in any way.
Right. And if enough racist bats become customers and all demand no Blacks deliver their stuff, what’s the store supposed to do with the Black drivers, pay them to sit in the driver’s lounge or whatever it’s called there? Even the recently-fired manager should be able to see that letting go of the drivers for that reason (color of their skin) would cause a storm so big that it would make gods blink.
Dude/Dudette, I’ don’t know what kind of shitty ass retail establishment you have worked in, but I promise you that the 50th largest company in the US, which is Lowes, is going to support a manager who held the line against racism by a customer. Which this guy did not do.
And as for if he should have been fired. IMHO, it depends. * "Yes ma’am, I wouldn’t want no darkie touching my Westinghouse either. * I’ll send Billy Bob over, he is as white as chalk!" Yep, he gets fired. Just plain old not knowing what to do, and so he reassigned someone without agreeing with her racism, then maybe I just reassign him. He is no longer a manager. He is on landscape loading detail.
I’m pretty sure this happened at least once back in my halcyon pizza delivery days. But times were different then. Twitter was just something birds did, and Facebook was just two random words joined to make a nonsense word. Tinder was… well, listen to me go on. Point was, near as I recall, the manager sent a white driver, and that was pretty much the end of it. The black drivers didn’t seem to mind not having to deliver to a racist redneck who damn sure wasn’t going to tip them, or maybe we didn’t have any black drivers. I probably should’ve thought about it more before starting this post. That said, there was a lot of pot smoking going around back then, so I’m not sure it would make any difference. Anyway, I hope I’ve helped in some small way.