Plan B Forum

Waitress Fired After Writing Racial Comment on a Couple’s Receipt

A waitress in St. Louis, Missouri, was fired after she labeled customers as a “Black Couple” on the receipt.

Kimberli Wilson was dining at Patrick’s Westport Grill in Westport Plaza. She told FOX2 St. Louis that the waitress wrote “Black Couple” on the receipt. “I was frustrated. I was angry. I was thinking, ‘Really? Are we still doing this in 2015?’” Wilson told FOX2 St. Louis.

Patrick Hanon, owner of Patrick’s Westport Grill, said that he has never encountered a situation like this since the restaurant opened in 1983. Hanon wrote an apology on the restaurant’s Facebook page and fired the waitress. He also offered Wilson and her companion complimentary food and drinks.

Hanon said that the waitress wrote those words on the receipt because she could not remember the table numbers, even though Wilson said she and her companion were sitting right by the restaurant entrance.

Hanon said that the restaurant has a no-tolerance policy for this type of behavior and is reevaluating the employee hiring, training, and screening process. “I have always treated my customers as family and encourage my employees to do so as well,” Hanon wrote on the Facebook page.

source

Stop the world, I want to get off.

Well first, it's St. Louis. If there weren't more than one black couple in the restaurant when she wrote it, there would be others arriving in due course, so as an identifier it's not particularly helpful.

Second, if you work in a city that is almost half African-American, and you still see race as the thing that sets a black person apart from everyone else, then you have some issues to work on. Would she have ever thought to write "white couple" to identify them? Blue dress, tan sportscoat, makeup applied with a trowel - there any number of things she would have noticed about a white couple (still would not have been good to write "makeup with trowel" on their receipt). But she sees a black couple, and can't manage to notice another blessed thing about them.

Or maybe, just fucking maybe, it was just an easy fucking way of the fucking waitress identifying them, it meant no fucking insult whatsoever, did not fucking demean or insult at fucking all, and maybe just maybe, if some people pulled their fucking heads out of their fucking arses and stopped crying "racism" each and every fucking time someone notices that someone else has a different fucking colour skin the world would be a better fucking place.

Racism consists of ideologies and practices that seek to justify, or cause, the unequal distribution of privileges, rights or goods among different racial groups. Modern variants are often based in social perceptions of biological differences between peoples. These can take the form of social actions, practices or beliefs, or political systems that consider different races to be ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities. It may also hold that members of different races should be treated differently

Point it out please?

People fucking live to be fucking offended these fucking days.
Fuck that.

And others live to be offensive.

I think firing the waitress was unjustified; there is nothing offensive to a reasonable person about such a descriptor, and certainly nothing racist. The manager should have placated the patrons short of terminating her employment, but I'm sure he was terrified of the certain social media and Yelper backlash.

She only had to identify them within her own tables and if they were the only black couple then " black couple" is a succinct adequate and inoffensive description.

The waitress did nothing wrong.


Yrs,
Rubato

Gob wrote:

Racism consists of ideologies and practices that seek to justify, or cause, the unequal distribution of privileges, rights or goods among different racial groups. Modern variants are often based in social perceptions of biological differences between peoples. These can take the form of social actions, practices or beliefs, or political systems that consider different races to be ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities. It may also hold that members of different races should be treated differently

Point it out please?

The last line. She used a customer race to identify them because they were black, or probably more charitably, non-white (she probably would have done the same to a Japanese couple). But it would not have occurred to her to identify a white customer by race; she would managed to see something other than skin colour.

Scooter wrote:

Gob wrote:

Racism consists of ideologies and practices that seek to justify, or cause, the unequal distribution of privileges, rights or goods among different racial groups. Modern variants are often based in social perceptions of biological differences between peoples. These can take the form of social actions, practices or beliefs, or political systems that consider different races to be ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities. It may also hold that members of different races should be treated differently

Point it out please?

The last line. She used a customer race to identify them because they were black, or probably more charitably, non-white (she probably would have done the same to a Japanese couple). But it would not have occurred to her to identify a white customer by race; she would managed to see something other than skin colour.

So fucking what? She didn't "identify" them as anything other than fucking Black, if there had been a white couple in among a load of black people, she may have called them "the white couple", but there would not have been any fucking furor over that.

Oops, sorry I was a bit racist there, calling the black couple "the black couple." Fuck me pink!!!

More fucking divisive shit from the racism industry.

I feel sorry for waitresses they are the poorest of the poor of American workers. They can’t afford to offend anyone; they are usually only one pay check from living on the streets. They work all day on their feet and then at the end of the day some managers want to take half of their tips. I don’t eat out a lot in restaurants, but when I do I hide my tip under the plate.

The pink person up there has a point.

It may be totally innocent with no intent beyond identifying the couple, but it's pretty stupid to write that down. Other silly things to write down would be bald guy, fat lady, ugly man, etc. All might be perfectly true and useful to the waitress to identify her customers, but why take a chance someone might be pissed off being called the bald guy? Many people would laugh it off, but some will not. Why not just assign numbers to the tables and identify the patrons that way?

Fat and ugly are a matter of opinion. Bald and black not so much.

Crackpot wrote:Fat and ugly are a matter of opinion. Bald and black not so much.

Identifying someone as "black" is merely a matter of cultural conditioning. My kids went to a predominantly black and Hispanic daycare/preschool. One day my son was telling me about one of the other kids in his class, and in an effort to figure out who he was talking about I asked if she was one of the black girls. He looked at me like I was an idiot and said, "We all have brown skin; just darker or lighter brown. She's the girl who has the pigtails and a blue jacket."

As to the waitress and the customers in the OP, it was a thoughtless way to identify the customers and an overreaction to make much of a fuss about it. But really, if a waitress can't identify her table numbers and can only differentiate customers by their skin color, she's probably in the wrong line of work.

Like the inability to make change, lots of servers don't bother to pay attention to who their customers are, either, and need a crutch. Several times I've seen my ticket say "girls at the bar." Um, hey, yeah, I'm 40-somethingyearsold. Most of my friends are 40+. Not sure that qualifies us as "girls" except in our own minds . . .

Sue if you want a class of employee that can be expected to do all that you're going to have to pay more. What you're asking for are skills after all.

PS I'd hate to see the reaction if she put "the dark completed couple".

Guinevere wrote:Um, hey, yeah, I'm 40-somethingyearsold. Most of my friends are 40+. Not sure that qualifies us as "girls" except in our own minds . . .

Oh, honey, you are still very much a girl ...

Sue--I'm reminded of an anecdote regarding Thurgood Marshall (the first black USSC justice). Once he was somewhere with other justices and someone was trying to explain to their colleague which one was Marshall by saying something about where he was standing (possibly for a photo). He said, "It's OK to say I'm the black guy". Not sure if it's true or not, but it's a good story.

Perhaps a bit of a diversion but not much - certainly a shameful admission that once in a while... just once in a while... being pinned to this old-fart elevating chair and having trouble typing/mousing for any length of time... well, I might look in on old "Family Feud" episodes on GSN

I've no idea when FF discovered black people and started ensuring that one of the two feudin' families is black, but at any rate, they did. And in Steve Harvey they even stepped out to have a black host. I'm getting there.... hold on...

So I was watching an episode yesterday and it was the one against one speed button question. "We surveyed 100 people and asked them, 'What would a door to door salesman hate to see you with when you opened the door?'"

The white guy buzzes first and says "A gun!". It was the #1 answer. But as the black guy turned disconsolately back to his family, Steve Harvey said, "Man... you mean to say you didn't get that one first? Wassup wit you? That was a shoo-in for you. Man!"

The next two up got ready on their buzzers and the young black lady looked at Steve Harvey and said, "Now, you supposed to be on my side, right?" He was taken aback. "Right? You on my side". Harvey recovered and sputtered "I'm the host. I don't take sides. If I do, I don't get paid and I got kids to get through college".

So who's profiling who? And suppose a white host had said to the black man that he should have got "Gun" before a white boy did. And suppose a white contestant, faced with a black contestant, said to the host, "Well, you are on my side of course!"

Fuss, much? (Yes, I have way too much time on my hands and I hate it!)