7 Apr 2025
Dream
Christi and I were in the parking lot of this grocery store and we were waiting to go inside. There were about 10 cars parked in a row. there was this lady and she was doing her job trying to keep things flowing. It seem like for some reason maybe we were waiting to go into the store and the other nine cars were white couples. Christi and I are an interracial couple and it seemed like the lady looked at us and then did a double take. It seemed like she wanted to talk to us because of me being black but then she approached Christi and said to Christi, "hey"! The lady was asking small questions and chit chatting with Christi, then she asked to see Christi's ID. The lady was running a background check like a police officer would run after pulling you over. she said, I'll be right back. Christi and I thought it was odd that she was checking our identification before entering the store. But we also thought it was clever that she didn't ask for my ID. Instead, she asked for Christi's ID so it wasn't obvious that she was racially profiling me. The lady returned and said everything was fine and we could go into the store. We stopped walking and said to the lady, hey we are aware of what you did with the ID and we acknowledged that it was clever how she asked for Christi's ID instead of mine. Nonetheless, we felt some sort of way about it. We let her know and told her she needed to make it right. The lady said okay I'll get you a gift certificate. She came back with a $20 gift certificate after we had said $20 or $25. We told her that $20 is not enough and then we need a $100 gift certificate. The lady went back into the store feeling defeated, but she came back with a $100 gift certificate. She still delivered good customer service when we gave us the gift certificate. We accepted it and then we stopped in the middle of our interaction similar to the host of that tv show, "What Would You Do?" Then we gave her a short summary of our observations of her and we told her that she did a great job with her customer service while talking with us and jumping through the extea hoop. She maintained a pleasant voice, demonstrated excellent customer service during a difficult interaction. we even told her it was clever how she asked for Christi's ID instead of my ID. We were hoping when we first told her what she could do to make it right, that she would have offered the $100 gift card right away. Then when you came back with the $20 gift card, that clearly was not enough to make it right. So when you came back with $100 gift card we felt like you really wanted to fix the situation and we were really impressed with your professionalism and customer service throughout once you realize you had made a mistake. You no longer tried to focus on racially profiling us. Instead you treated us well and we really appreciate that about you. After we shared our feedback, the lady felt a lot better and we felt like she had learned a lesson. Then we went into the store and we were shopping and looking for food to get. we really wanted some yogurt because we saw someone walking out with a parfait and it looked good. After that we got some milk we checked out and then we were headed somewhere, I'm not sure where.
