Chipotle manager fired - made African americans prove they can pay BEFORE ORDERING

[apnu]

44. No. I will elaborate what I mean.

I guess you haven't worked in fast food. You serve everybody. You wait for money before you give out the food. People who can't pay are less than .1% of the patrons on any given day. Most days it never happens. Profits will absorb any wasted food due to non-sale. All restaurants have end of day food waste (cooked but unsold meat, for example). Some can save it for the next day, some can't, that depends on the food. But they all have excess waste built into their budgets. Doesn't matter if the waste is because of someone trying to scam them or some line cook over cooking.

Plus, no fast food place I have ever worked in or visited as a customer ever asked me if I had money to pay. This included my poor-as-dirt punk and goth days in the 90s, when I'd go to Denny's looking like a black leather street rat with no money and making everybody in the restaurant uncomfortable. Granted I'm white so I have privilege no matter what kind of scumbag I look like.

The point is, everybody has a plan for dealing with product waste.

They also have plans to deal with fraud, usually internal fraud that the managers are responsible to watch for.

Chains like Chipotle has quotas for such things. And managers who report too much waste will get in trouble. Maybe that was happening here. Maybe this manager was feeling corporate pressure, waste has to be a big deal with Chipotle since everything is made to order, and maybe that pressure caused her to slip.

She's white and privileged by her whiteness. She's taught by white culture to be suspicious of African Americans at all times. We don't know if she's a conscious racist or unconscious one, but she stepped in it regardless.

But regardless of that, every bit of training I had in food service was to be nice and cordial to all patrons no matter what. This was told to me in every restaurant I worked at. Even when I was washing dishes and taking out the trash. Happy smiles all the time and the customer is always right.

If you catch a patron stealing, then all that can go out the window. Call the cops, but otherwise you let the thief go.

I worked at a mom-and-pop burger joint in a college town, we'd have kids trying to steal food all the time. Sometimes they got the better of us and the owner would get pissed and chase after the thief. We weren't allowed to, that was his thing. He'd shout at us to stay. Then later he'd yell at us about what we did wrong.

But the point is, again, even the small business has some kind of awareness and system for dealing with waste and fraud, and not once that I've ever experienced was asking if someone can pay before taking or making the order.

In today's Social Media reality, companies have to be extra aware of employee conduct because everybody has a camera in their pocket and unlimited storage (FB, Twitter, Reddit -- can store all the content you ever generate). So they have to be careful employees are projecting the correct image the company wants far more than what it was like 30 years ago. When some shops had bad employees and managers and had reputations for being scumbags. It was all locally known, nobody could become a Global Internet Villain in an hour.