called a racist

[Sailornight6]

um ok be nice i am still new.

i have worked in a chain grocery store in NY. i have been at it for over 5 1/2 years. i have many stories from the store but one that sticks out of my mind is this women from my first year there. (why i didn't run then i will never know)

well i am a bagger, one of the lower rungs on this store totem. so it was the busy touriest season, and we get all types of ppl who normally don't shop at our store. well this one black lady comes to my line. like always the cashier is ringing though and i am bagging. i am waiting patiently for her to finish up with her shopping cart so i can start loading it up. i am being buried in food and bags so i would desperatly like to drop the bags in the cart. this lady notices me looking longly at her shopping cart, and starts yelling at me. she starts saying that she isn't stealing and that i was thinking she was stealing just because i wanted her cart. i tired telling her i just wanted her cart so i could load her food into it, rather then putting it on the floor. she started calling me a racist.
i am like lady i just want your cart. eventully she checks out and leaves, me being young and stupid of the world tried to figure out what i did wrong, or what i could have done differntly. my coworker assured me that this women has done this rant before to others. i felt a little bit better, but still had to retreat into the bottle room to control myself, i refuse to cry in front of customers.

still i wonder what i did wrong?

[ominousoat]

Congratulations on your first post. You didn't do a thing wrong, you just happened to have wandered into the sucky customer zone...it is a place of no logic, nor reason...

[Spiffy McMoron]

Welcome to CS.com!

From the sounds of it, you didn't do anything wrong at all. You just did your job. Just let her say her piece, and ler her realize that you aren't racist at all. Of course, there's no guarentee that she'll do that, but you can only lead a horse to water-you can't make it drink.

[Rubystars]

I'm one of the few white cashiers at my store, so I often have had this card pulled on me. It has happened when I checked money for counterfeits, when I used bags that got pulled off the carousel rather than a 'fresh' one, when I've asked for ID, etc. etc. It's just a stupid game that people play because they're paranoid and can't figure out this isn't the 19- f-ing - 50s.

[Sailornight6]

oh i have lots more stories from that place, this was just the first one that jumps to my mind. i now look out for the women, i see her i dodge her. i conviently have to go out for carts now when i see her.

[Sailornight6]

thank you for the welcome, i look foward to many many more posts.

[Kara]

Welcome! I'm still fairly new m'self around here, but since I work in customer service for a major wireless phone company, I get several stories a day worth sharing, so you'll see my pretty face around a lot!

That used to happen to me occasionally when I was the asst. manager of the Video department at the grocery store I worked at. After several months of not returning videos, we considered it theft and turned them over to the police, only to have a lot of complaints that we were only harassing them because of race (we had a large hispanic community when I lived there). There were just as many white folks that had police beating on their doors too. Needless to say, these complaints didn't go very far.

People don't pull the race card on me much since I work over the phones, but I had a middle-eastern customer that was yelling and screaming at me back when I first started that claimed ever since 9/11 we had been charging him for calls he didn't make and making up fake charges on his bill, and he was reporting us to the BBB (I love that threat. "No, no, not the BBB! Anything but that! You'll ruin our $100 billion company!)

[BookstoreEscapee]

I'm one of the few white cashiers at my store, so I often have had this card pulled on me. It has happened when I checked money for counterfeits, when I used bags that got pulled off the carousel rather than a 'fresh' one, when I've asked for ID, etc. etc. It's just a stupid game that people play because they're paranoid and can't figure out this isn't the 19- f-ing - 50s.

We used to use those pens to check bills, until someone somewhere complained to corporate and they decreed that we couldn't use them any more. I still checked for the watermark and stuff, though. Ironically, we only checked big bills and the only fakes I've ever seen were singles and fives.

Oh, and Sailornight6, sorry for the OT and -

[Rubystars]

I check 5s and above, because 5s and above all have that watermark and it only takes a moment to check by looking in the bottom right corner. If people notice me checking fives, they almost always think it's because I hate their race, even though I check everyone's bills.

[Sailornight6]

i live in a primarly white comunity, its upstate ny. the only time we see real diveristy is during the summer months, when all of the downstaters invade my little town.