Restaurant manager fired for accommodating a bigoted customer's demand

When a customer who had just been seated at an Indiana Olive Garden found out that her server was going to be a black woman she caused a scene, making comments about the server's race and appearance and loudly demanding a non-black server instead. The restaurant manager immediately acquiesced to the demand and reassigned a different waitress who wasn't black to the table.

It was actually a nearby-seated customer who witnessed the entire incident and was so appalled by both the customer's behavior and the manager's instant accommodation of it that he took to both the company's complaint line and social media to bring public notice to the situation.

Quote:

Robbins wrote in his Facebook post that the customer should’ve been refused service for even making such a demand and that it is "disgusting" that the manager would honor it, especially considering the restaurant's diverse staff. Donahue [the black server who was yelled at] said she was so upset by the incident that she began crying, which Robbins said he witnessed. "The young lady was in tears and had no one to support her," Robbins said Wednesday. "So I felt if I didn’t write this post, nothing would have happened and she would continue to go to work for a place that she feels uncomfortable at and unwanted at." Donahue said the manager made a decision that the customer was more important than two of his employees. Meagan Bernstein, a spokeswoman for Olive Garden, said Wednesday the restaurant chain has zero tolerance for discrimination of any kind. Bernstein said the company completed an investigation Monday. "As a result of our investigation, we made the decision to separate with the manager involved," she said.

Although the restaurant's staff as noted was quite diverse, that doesn't necessarily indicate that the manager him/herself isn't particularly bigoted, and I really can't say either way without more information. Regardless, it is indeed disgusting that they didn't even hesitate to hang their own employees out to dry in the face of such overt and abusive racism at the hands of a "customer". I have to commend the other patron for making the incident public, and I think firing the manager was a fair and correct decision on the part of the company.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2IiFYxp