Postmodern Business Policies

“Race” as Customer Service

(I no longer work at the business mentioned below)

I do not usually blog about personal instances in my life. My reasoning for this is simple: there are more important things going on in the world and with movements (whether religious or political) than anything happening in my life. But there are times when one says, that’s it, I have to say something.

The experience wasn’t necessarily mine either, but one of our customers in our store which may have involved me (?). As many of you know I work at a store that sells a wide assortment of wine, liquor, beer, and the like. As with any store that doesn’t have someone at the door checking receipts, we have product in lockup that are either high theft items or expensive.

The scenario is similar to when I worked at Ralph’s, if a person wanted something out of the lockup, a manager or a box-boy/girl would personally walk the item up to the front of the store where the person could buy it or have it held until their shopping is done. Pretty much every store in the SCV/California/America/ and the world has this practice.

This being said, the customer in our store asked for a high-theft product that was in lockup. Remember, our policy is to walk anything that is of high theft value or high price personally to the register for the customer to purchase then, or to have held until their shopping is done.

Well.

Apparently this person was offended that they couldn’t shop with it in their cart as if our store or the person involved (me?) was calling them a thief personally. Not only a thief, but according to the tone of the letter, they felt they were not allowed to carry the bottle due to their race, which was one of the first things the letter mentions. Why, I do not know other than they felt it played a role in them not being allowed to carry the item with them. Since the customer felt race was pertinent enough to raise as an issue, so to will I. My grandmother is black; I have cousins that I guarantee are darker in their melatonin than the offended customer.

I was truly graced by growing up in one of the poorest neighborhoods Detroit had to offer. I was one of two white kids in the public school there, and all my friends were black. Yes black, not African-American . . . black! I’m white, my friends are black, and we are all Americans. I am not an Irish-Italian-African-American, I am simply an American. The gentleman pictured below is African-American, the well-known gentleman below him is not:

Black kids wanting to fight me at school for merely being white, and having nothing but black friends and some black family members was an experience that made me grow up quickly by making adult distinctions about racism, race, love, hate, ignorance, friendship, and the like. While it truly may be that this couple sincerely misinterpreted why we do not allow persons (whomever they are) to walk around the store with merchandise the store deems high risk, I still have this gnawing in the back of my mind that the grievance calling race into question at the outset is done with a race-holding mentality (Shelby Steele). One of my favorite authors and radio commentators likes to call these race-holding peoples victicrates. (By-the-by, I have five favorite political authors/commentators/professors, and four of them for those who care are black.) According to Larry Elder a "victicrat is one who blames all ills, problems, concerns, and unhappiness on others" (Ten Things You Cant Say In America, p. 22).

Our store has a bunch of young kids who could care less about the race of anyone! These kids are just following precedent. I look like a skin-head, but anyone who knows me and deals with me at the store knows I don’t have a racist bone in my body. In fact, because of my religious views on creation (see my blog on Racism and Evolution for instance [still a good link, but I do not blog there any longer 2-4-07), I believe the first man and woman were brown or red in color with a gene pool to allow for the slight variations in the races (dark and light people in other words). Over 100 cultures have stories of the first man being created as a red man; the Hebrew root word for Adam in the Bible is the word for red clay.

So anyone trying to paint me one way is suffering from the "conspiracy-theory syndrome of a person suffering from the victim mentality and looks for all kinds of bizarre evidence to support their claims" (Star Parker, White Ghetto, p. 66). Numbers chapter 12 in the Old Testament has Moses marrying a Cushitic woman; the Cushite tribes are the founding people of the Ethiopians. Miriam, Moses’ sister, spoke out against this interracial marriage that YHWH had blessed. Miriam was struck with an illness until she repented from her racism.

Another employee we have is the wonderful “Mother Jones”; she is a black woman who has a bunch of wonderful kids and a very cool hubby! She is my surrogate wife, when my wife cannot reign in my spending habits at the store; Mother Jones steps in and extends the long arm of the spousal law. If anyone knows how unbiased I am, it would be a strong black woman working right next to me.

So what has become of this you may ask (other than me airing my concerns and commentary)? What I see happening now is product being handed over to anyone who asks . . . which will very probably increase employee theft as well as customer theft. These two logical conclusions will eventually result in any business, not just ours, having the improper inventory actually in the store, which hurts the customer as well as the profit margin of the company. This would put a bad taste in the mouth of business owners to expand product choice or to hire humorous, good looking guys like myself that have a mind to engage in not only frivolous talk with customers but meet their needs on all levels.

And this is key: a company will never survive long if it looks at every complaint as equally valid and sincere. In our postmodern world where everyone feels entitled to have every opinion weighed with all the reverence of another option or opinion [is craziness], companies (not just mine) should learn to juggle rational policies with customer service. It’s Econ 101.