"I didn't think [the cashier] was trying to offend the lady in any type of way, but she did. It wasn't meant to harm her in any way. But I apologize on behalf of my staff for that."Geez, that Minhee Cho is pretty thin-skinned to be offended by that. (You can't see my eyes rolling, but they are.)
To be honest, though, I'm starting to be a little surprised this kind of thing doesn't happen more often, since apparently a lot of food service companies are employing bored, minimally paid, and barely literate teenagers to fill in descriptions and/or names of customers who come into their stores. Add to that litany of adjectives "compromised when it comes to notions about what is acceptable to say in public regarding race, ethnicity, and gender issues."
Yes, I blame rap music and hip-hop and shock culture and all that stuff, where calling people bitches or the N-word is promoted and raised up as normal and acceptable, and where racial or ethnic humor is no longer frowned up but is considered edgy and cool.
That girl who wrote that should lose her job, but perhaps a learning lesson could be snatched from this. A beer summit, but with pizza and no president. People have got to re-learn this stuff of basic decency which somehow inexplicably the American culture seems to have unlearned.
That's right, my 2012 new year's resolution was to turn into an old coot ranting about kids today (except that it's not just kids... it's people the same age as this Gen Xer, as well as our parents).
I've also resolved to lose three or four kilograms and get rock-hard abs, but that's a post for another time.
Resting heart rate: 51 bpm
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Jeez. This happened to a friend of mine when he got a pizza from one of the bigger chains... they described him on the slip as 'f***ot'. The company gave him a kind apology and $20k. And the employee got fired.
ReplyDeleteIf I spoke about someone like that when I was younger (or even now!), my folks would've kicked me clear into next Tuesday.
It has to do with the breakdown of the family and not rap music. The store was in Harlem and despite gentrification, it is not exactly known for its immaculate environment. It's about raising children properly, which is difficult to do if one is a single mother who is struggling to make ends meet. I don't blame the mothers who work hard to support their children as much as I blame the fathers who run away leaving their kids to grow up in run-down, dilapidated neighborhoods. One just needs to drive by those areas to feel the utter malaise and volatile distress that results from living in an area with drugs, gangs, and helplessness. When children grow up in such circumstances, they harden and lose their sense of empathy, so it is easy for them to be uncivil.
ReplyDeleteA lot of ordinary people do nasty things (meth, drunk driving, smoking, nymphomania, child abuse, not paying child support, robbery, murder, etc.), and it all can't be blamed on the usual suspects as it has pretty much been going on since the beginning of time (well, that of Cain and Abel if you are a bible thumper), so I'm pretty sure that basic decency has never been all that common. Hell, not that long ago, some religious nuts had the decency to discover the New World and change the lives of those previously undiscovered Native Americans for the worse. But one can just drive by any of our overcrowded prisons to see just how decent our society really is in this, and every past, day and age.
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