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It's the first Saturday of the month, which means the Store is packed to the gills, we've got all the checkstands open, and we can still barely keep up with the lines. The store manager has already gone home for the evening, so I, along with the other two shift supervisors on the clock at the time, am in charge of this 100,000 square-foot store with over a thousand people inside it at any given moment. (At least we're getting paid union wages.) I'm restocking a display on the floor when the customer service clerk calls on the radio for a lead to come up to the service counter, because there's a customer who wants to complain about another customer.
These kinds of calls are usually petty nonsense like "this guy cut in line ahead of me" or "she grabbed the last of something I wanted", stuff that we have no interest in adjudicating and which generally end up wasting our time. But one of the other leads is on break and the other is helping a vendor at the receiving dock, so I go up to talk to the customer.
The customer is a middle-aged Latino woman (this is important) who tells me that her and her also-Latino friend have been doing their shopping and that, about three or four times, the same guy has come up behind them, picked up the back wheels of his cart, and then slammed them on the floor startling them, and that he laughed about it and didn't apologize when she told them to be more respectful. That's... well, that's a new one on me. I ask her if she can describe him, but all she can really say is that he's tall and white and has a white woman with him. I apologize to her and tell her we'll keep an eye out, and she says that if she sees the man again she'll come back to the counter and point him out.
I don't have much hope that we'll be able to find this guy. There are hundreds of tall white guys in the store at any given moment. We have security cameras, but the LP office is busy and I can't ask them to stop what they're doing to try and track this guy down for me. I let the other leads know to keep an eye out and I go back to the display I'm working on.
Not 30 seconds after I get back to my display I hear the sound of a cart being slammed around near me. I stop and look around and I see a tall white guy, with a white woman with him. He's wearing a baseball hat affiliated with a certain candidate for federal office (I'm not going to name names to keep this out of fratching territory, but I think you know who I mean.) I watch him while I keep doing my job. I don't make eye contact with him, but I'm clearly visible to him and he'd have to know I was there. As I watch, he comes up behind a Latino couple - and slams his cart on the ground again, and I see him crack a smile about it, even while his wife/girlfriend is giving him the stink-eye. I follow him around the corner and less than a minute later he does the same thing to another Latino couple. I am positively seeing red at this point, and I walk right up to him and tell him that I know what he's been doing, that several people have complained about it, that we're watching him, and if he does it one more time he'll be kicked out of the store and trespassed from the property. (I don't actually have the power to trespass anyone, but he didn't need to know that.) He sheepishly said "OK" and kept on walking, and neither I nor any of the other leads or floor staff saw or heard him try it again. Honestly, the only reason I didn't kick him out on the spot was that he was all the way towards the back of the store and I didn't want to get security involved in case he decided to make a scene.
Seriously, though. WTF? How in the hell do you reach the age of adulthood and think that this kind of behavior is in any way socially acceptable? Do you have nothing better to do with your time than harass people at the grocery store who don't look like you? Your girl obviously didn't think it was very funny. Are you that incapable of dealing with the fact that this country isn't some Leave It To Beaver lily-white fantasy land that never existed in the real world?
It's not even as if this was happening in the deep south, or the Midwest, or somewhere white people don't see minorities very often. This is the Pacific Northwest. This is a majorly liberal, majorly diverse place with lots of significant minority groups living here - besides Hispanics and African-Americans, we have a major Korean neighborhood, a major Vietnamese neighborhood, a big Russian population, lots of Natives living both on and off reservations, a big Filipino/Chamorro population, we even have a practicing Sikh who works here and wears his turban with his work uniform. (Thank goodness I haven't had to deal with anyone assuming that "turban = terrorist".) I work and interact with people of all colors and nationalities every day and I treat them all with the same amount of respect that I'd want to be treated. That you believed, in the year 2016, that it was OK for you to go around in this town in this part of the country and act like being white makes you better than other people - I can't even fathom that mindset.
Really, as a white guy myself, it offends me because jerks like this make white people look bad. Guys like this make lots of people think all white guys are assholes who don't care about them if they're not white. I know he saw me there when he was pulling this stunt, and he probably thought that because I was white I wouldn't care that he was picking on non-white people. And that really makes me mad - that some people can be so casually racist that they assume everyone else who shares their skin color is just as casually racist as they are.
Grrrrrr.
These kinds of calls are usually petty nonsense like "this guy cut in line ahead of me" or "she grabbed the last of something I wanted", stuff that we have no interest in adjudicating and which generally end up wasting our time. But one of the other leads is on break and the other is helping a vendor at the receiving dock, so I go up to talk to the customer.
The customer is a middle-aged Latino woman (this is important) who tells me that her and her also-Latino friend have been doing their shopping and that, about three or four times, the same guy has come up behind them, picked up the back wheels of his cart, and then slammed them on the floor startling them, and that he laughed about it and didn't apologize when she told them to be more respectful. That's... well, that's a new one on me. I ask her if she can describe him, but all she can really say is that he's tall and white and has a white woman with him. I apologize to her and tell her we'll keep an eye out, and she says that if she sees the man again she'll come back to the counter and point him out.
I don't have much hope that we'll be able to find this guy. There are hundreds of tall white guys in the store at any given moment. We have security cameras, but the LP office is busy and I can't ask them to stop what they're doing to try and track this guy down for me. I let the other leads know to keep an eye out and I go back to the display I'm working on.
Not 30 seconds after I get back to my display I hear the sound of a cart being slammed around near me. I stop and look around and I see a tall white guy, with a white woman with him. He's wearing a baseball hat affiliated with a certain candidate for federal office (I'm not going to name names to keep this out of fratching territory, but I think you know who I mean.) I watch him while I keep doing my job. I don't make eye contact with him, but I'm clearly visible to him and he'd have to know I was there. As I watch, he comes up behind a Latino couple - and slams his cart on the ground again, and I see him crack a smile about it, even while his wife/girlfriend is giving him the stink-eye. I follow him around the corner and less than a minute later he does the same thing to another Latino couple. I am positively seeing red at this point, and I walk right up to him and tell him that I know what he's been doing, that several people have complained about it, that we're watching him, and if he does it one more time he'll be kicked out of the store and trespassed from the property. (I don't actually have the power to trespass anyone, but he didn't need to know that.) He sheepishly said "OK" and kept on walking, and neither I nor any of the other leads or floor staff saw or heard him try it again. Honestly, the only reason I didn't kick him out on the spot was that he was all the way towards the back of the store and I didn't want to get security involved in case he decided to make a scene.
Seriously, though. WTF? How in the hell do you reach the age of adulthood and think that this kind of behavior is in any way socially acceptable? Do you have nothing better to do with your time than harass people at the grocery store who don't look like you? Your girl obviously didn't think it was very funny. Are you that incapable of dealing with the fact that this country isn't some Leave It To Beaver lily-white fantasy land that never existed in the real world?
It's not even as if this was happening in the deep south, or the Midwest, or somewhere white people don't see minorities very often. This is the Pacific Northwest. This is a majorly liberal, majorly diverse place with lots of significant minority groups living here - besides Hispanics and African-Americans, we have a major Korean neighborhood, a major Vietnamese neighborhood, a big Russian population, lots of Natives living both on and off reservations, a big Filipino/Chamorro population, we even have a practicing Sikh who works here and wears his turban with his work uniform. (Thank goodness I haven't had to deal with anyone assuming that "turban = terrorist".) I work and interact with people of all colors and nationalities every day and I treat them all with the same amount of respect that I'd want to be treated. That you believed, in the year 2016, that it was OK for you to go around in this town in this part of the country and act like being white makes you better than other people - I can't even fathom that mindset.
Really, as a white guy myself, it offends me because jerks like this make white people look bad. Guys like this make lots of people think all white guys are assholes who don't care about them if they're not white. I know he saw me there when he was pulling this stunt, and he probably thought that because I was white I wouldn't care that he was picking on non-white people. And that really makes me mad - that some people can be so casually racist that they assume everyone else who shares their skin color is just as casually racist as they are.
Grrrrrr.
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