Background of the cashier is irrelevant. The pattern of 3-to-1 differential treatment of customers is, with the “let me get a manager” being the icing on the cake.
Uncivil cheap-shot. Here, have a flag.
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Uncivil cheap shot here have a flag? Not sure I get that.
You spout only cliched ‘opinions’ which again are just toeing the line of the liberal masses saying what they know to sound agreeable to their peers. Maybe your ‘flag’ is of a different colour (Color) but herd mentality is dangerous in all forms.
The race of the ALLEGED racist is irrelevant?
THATS BRILLIANT! I’m totally enlightened you intellectual ninja, please, more insight!
Haha. And sometimes, people are just racists.
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I certainly did not mean to derail the conversation about racism. I don’t think pointing out that they were victims of a double-whaming of discrimination was belittling the racist part of it.
Because of a glitch in the machine, the very people dependant on their plastic cards to eat that day got turned away. That part had as much to do with them being on food stamps than them being black (which increases their odds of being on food stamps in the first place). And of course they had ‘food cards’ instead of cash because we don’t trust poor people with cash either since drugs/booze/fun stuffs. Just sounds double- if not triple- fucked to me.
ETA: Also, classism feeds and enables racism, because one of the best way to doom a group of people to unchecked contempt and exploitation is to systematically prevent them from accessing to wealth. It’s one heck of a vicious circle. Racism is the motive but classism is often the weapon.
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Just going to throw this out there, maybe it was the use of EBT cards, and not racism that influenced her actions. There’s a lot more to the situation than race.
Tell that to black people who, no matter how dressed up and otherwise well off they look, get asked to show additional ID while using a credit card, when the white people ahead and behind them in line don’t. Sometimes, people are just racists.
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You know how much money you’re spending with credit or debit as well. That’s like the initialisation phase of the transaction ritual - they tell you how much it will be, and that’s your prompt to hand them your payment method.
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racist? or classist?
What part of Pennsylvania?
Because as James Carville famously described the state, Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburg with Alabama in between.
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And points, or miles or whatever.
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read the thread? or just go ahead and vomit up a topic that’s already been addressed ad nauseum?
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Sure… but it’s less real. Because it’s not actual cash leaving your hand. Plus, it’s a direct transaction, or at least less abstracted when you use a card. But that’s just me… YMMV.
I know someone who sometimes starts sentences with “I don’t mean to be ugly…” which is followed by something not very nice about someone. After a few times, I cut her off and said “then please don’t”. She at least has stopped around me.
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We had people come into the convenience store where I worked asking if we took EBT. The answer was no, but believe it or not, businesses don’t care if the money comes from EBT, it still spends. My boss had it on her to-do list to set up our system for it. But people (mostly white, because of the demographics of this area) who do not use EBT would come in all the time and discover they didn’t have money on their debit cards. People who live week to week, or paycheck to paycheck working in almost-full-time jobs for minimum wage don’t always lack discipline, they do tend to lack money. Hell, I’ve been there. “I know I have around ten bucks in my checking account and I get paid tomorrow. This stuff comes to about nine bucks, I should be okay.” Then I’d get denied because I forgot I bought something the other day. Whoops. Shit happens. People also regularly forget their PINs. So I’m not too down on the cashier for the first incident. After that, it should have been obvious something was going on.
Meanwhile, a lot EBT schemes are set up so that the payment card industry can profit. Want to check your balance? There’s a fee. Want to withdraw? There’s a fee. Accidentally hit debit instead of credit? There’s a fee. Reset pin? There’s a fee. They are usually as punitive as most gift cards when you want to do fucking anything. Really, I’m surprised that there isn’t more outcry at the amount of welfare money that gets leached to the PCI.
Personally, I’d have told the cashier to keep her opinions about customers to herself. I’ve worked frustrating customer service/retail jobs myself. I’m working one now, and while I generally feel that people should not unduly harass and harangue people who get crappy pay and are largely not in control of your shopping experience, I have absolutely no qualms about confronting someone like this. If they’re not ashamed to say their piece, then I’m not ashamed to say mine.
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Sometimes, the more well-off they look, the more shit they get from certain people.
At a previous job one of my coworker’s parents were Klansmen. He thought it was silly and he wasn’t a racist, but he said he sort of understood some of what they believed in, “Like keeping the race pure.” Sorry. People who aren’t “racist,” are often racist. Or am I supposed to believe that he acted with fairness in all his interactions with people of color, because you know- “a lot is going on.”
Meanwhile, I worked at a place that had a credit card minimum. A Black man came in and tried to buy something less that $5 and I informed him of our policy. He asked where that was written down. I pointed, only to realize the sign had disappeared (it later turned out that there was a second sticker right at the POS, but I wasn’t positioned to see it.) He was flabbergasted, and offended, and I am 100% sure he thought I was being racist, instead of the truth, which is that I was just chewed out for forgetting the policy a few times. It was an unpleasant experience all around. Do people get frustrated by card minimums all the time? Yes. Was there “a lot going on there?” Absolutely. One of those things was race-dynamics, which are hardly separable from issues of class.
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A couple of personal observations about food stamps:
- I have been on them for a couple of times myself, when I was in my early twenties and had difficulty finding decent, permanent employment. Both times, I was deeply ashamed, although now I wish I’d applied for them any and every month I was eligible; I thought I’d get glares from the cashiers and whispered (or out-loud) comments from the other people in line. Never happened. Same for waiting in line for food banks and government commodities. Oh hey, did I mention that I’m white?
- Much later, I worked for a library system that had the idea to set up the bookmobile to help people apply for jobs and work on their resumes; part of this effort involved taking the bookmobile to places where you’d expect people who needed jobs to be, such as, say, the food stamp office. I stopped in the office to use the bathroom or say hi to the manager or something, and I was standing next to a white woman who was either applying or waiting while someone else applied. A couple of black women left the office, and apropos of absolutely nothing on my part, the white woman turned to me and said, “You know, they all drive Cadillacs here.”
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Depending on the age of the system, touchscreens can, and do, drift out of calibration; and both mechanical and membrane keyboards are vulnerable to infiltration by contaminants. Key ‘matrix’ designs are particularly vulnerable to generating spurious keystrokes. Discrete key switches are more expensive; but contain failures better.
Could also be an unplugged or otherwise borked network connection, and a terminal failing stupid instead of throwing up a proper error message.
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I support POSes. PCI network availability is… Spotty. At least in my stores. Typically pinging the auth servers can take 300ms,and on a bad day upwards of 500ms. There’s issues with timing windows too. Our system fails if the latency gets worse than about 800ms, which happens all the time in the restaurant side of the business.
We don’t take EBT though, just credit debit and merch cards, and once a quarter we send out stored-value loyalty cards handled by a completely different vendor. They ALWAYS fuck up. Like clockwork, because there’s no way to do a refund if a loyalty card is used that doesn’t screw up end of day banking.
Truly POS systems have earned their acronym, fair and square.
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