Shopping While Black

[Checkmite]

Instead, we have a contradiction even in how many garments were involved, the lawyer now claiming that there were only four but only three were seen, while the initial account is that four were seen and a fifth presumed. of course that might be what happened but that is not what is reported.

Wow - really? Link for this?

 

[Checkmite]

No, I don't. In fact, I wouldn't expect anyone, of any race, to get away with saying a dress 'accidentally fell into' their bag. You would, I take it?

Of course not; and neither will I accept "oops, I accidentally saw five dresses when there were really only four and had to call the police on them for stealing, understandable mistake!" to be an acceptable excuse for the disruption to their lives that these two women faced as a consequence.

 

[luchog]

Vintage means old, and is generally not very recently old. A store that specialises in "vintage clothing" or "vintage fashion" is almost certainly not going to have newly-manufactured clothing that is made to look old, or made to look vintage. That designation is generally called "retro" and is something entirely different.

"Vintage" does not always mean "old". All of the trendy second-hand-clothing stores here use the term "vintage" in preference to "second-hand" or "used" or "pre-worn" or "thrift". The clothing that can be found in such shops ranges from multiple-decades old, to stuff that was trendy last year. The predominant difference between "vintage" clothing stores and thrift stores is that the former typically purchase the clothing they sell, rather than taking donations, and curate their inventory to convey a particular image, rather than selling anything and everything that qualifies as wearable. And the clothing is priced accordingly.

 

[bruto]

Wow - really? Link for this?

Somewhere upthread is a follow up article in which the lawyer makes a statement. I'm kind of halfway between supper and fixing a winch right now so if you can't find it I'll check later.f

It's in ddt's post #82, where the lawyer Kron says a clerk saw them go in with four items and come out with three, and also elucidates further on the "furtive behavior."

 

[mgidm86]

Great point, and agreed. I think all agree that the clerk was wrong about there being an extra dress.

So what are the possible scenarios being invented? She is racist...she is stupid...she is a liar...

This is getting scary. Thermal, I agree with your stance on this 100%. You are virtually the only person in this thread thinking rather than feeling - maybe I missed a few others. This is a skeptics site and wow what a disappointment this forum is becoming.

People have condemned her as racist with zero - ZERO evidence to support it. ZEE-ROW. In fact this is the case with almost all the similar stories posted on this forum in the past few weeks.

And we jump straight to racism, not prejudice, not stupidity, not maybe the customers actually were a-holes. Instant racism. The ink isn't even dry on this story yet. And it's always the same posters which tells me a lot. We NEED this to be racism dammit! We need as many reasons as possible to hate you white Trump people that caused this county to go into a racist tailspin! That's all it is.

I'm not siding with anyone because there is not enough information, and frankly this is not news to me. If you wanna prove racism is on the rise surely you can find more clear-cut examples than these? What a joke.

 

[Cavemonster]

I'm not siding with anyone because there is not enough information, and frankly this is not news to me. If you wanna prove racism is on the rise surely you can find more clear-cut examples than these? What a joke.

Who precisely is claiming that this incident is evidence that racism is on the rise?

Can you quote the post?

 

[Checkmite]

Somewhere upthread is a follow up article in which the lawyer makes a statement. I'm kind of halfway between supper and fixing a winch right now so if you can't find it I'll check later.f

It's in ddt's post #82, where the lawyer Kron says a clerk saw them go in with four items and come out with three, and also elucidates further on the "furtive behavior."

Thanks, yes. The store (via its attorney) seems to be changing the details of its story on the fly to better match events. Originally they claim they saw the two women emerge with four items but thought there were actually five; now they say they thought there were four items but they saw the women emerge with only three.

According to the OP's news article,

A fan of '70s fashion, Bedard picked out a bathing suit and three dresses. A dark-haired clerk told the mother and daughter to share a fitting room to try on the clothes, Bedard said.

When they exited, a blond-haired clerk confronted the two about a fifth clothing item.

"I remember counting on my fingers: 'One, two, three, four. There is no missing item,'" the lawyer said.

The victims specifically remember being accosted over a fifth item and asserted in their defense that there were only ever four items. Now the store asserts that they correctly counted the number of items as four but "thought they saw" only three items come out, which would make it highly odd for the victims to then defend themselves by maintaining that there was no missing fifth item; it's nonsensical.

 

[ponderingturtle]

Yeah, and what about the black on black violence that vastly outnumbers the cops?

Oh **** I ********** up again. I keep forgetting black lives only have to matter to white people.

And of course guns are most likely to kill a family member instead of save their life, but opps I forgot your families lives only matter if the blacks are rampaging through the neighborhood and need lots of ammo to stop them.

Getting away with murder only a problem when OJ does it, when cops to it no one is supposed to care.

 

[Thermal]

The report is pretty specific that although the racial slurs may have been immediate, the threats occurred after the clerk pursued the customers out of the store. If the clerk was reacting to threats to her safety, it was prescient. I don't think it's unimaginable. I just see no evidence that it is what happened, nor any evidence that if it is, any effort was made to straighten it out before blame was attached to the customers. An explanation like that would certainly help the case of the management but it was not made. Instead, we have a contradiction even in how many garments were involved, the lawyer now claiming that there were only four but only three were seen, while the initial account is that four were seen and a fifth presumed.

You keep saying this. Do you find it significant for some reason? It only says to me that there was some confusion about the number of garments. What difference would it possibly make whether the clerk thought there was three or four or five that went in; she made the mistake of thinking one less garment came out, which only makes sense if we assume she thought she saw one go in which didn't come out. It really makes no never-mind what the total number was. Are you suggesting some kind of conspiracy, or what?

of course that might be what happened but that is not what is reported. As stated before, the report says the clerk confronted the customer and said the security video would show the truth, the customer said it would, and left the store, whereupon the clerk pursued her, and that is when the threats, if any, occurred.

Fine. There were no threats till later, or never if you prefer. The question stands: Just having her race, class and appearance insulted, and being accused of racism (funnily enough, by a woman hurling racial slurs), should the clerk hang her head and slink away? Or should such behavior be considered the escalation of the event from routine loss prevention to a hostile conflict?

Remember too that the account of threats is from the clerk, and while she might be telling the truth, her reliability is not impeccable, and the stories of the management do not entirely match.

Right. No one's reliability is impeccable. Management got the story from the clerk, and I give little to no weight to the lawyer's spin (forgive my cynicism).

And at the root of all this we have the report of the clerk that the customers were acting suspiciously, specifically because they were occupying the same changing room. Now that may not be racially loaded but considering that the customers were doing EXACTLY what another clerk told them to do, it certainly seems odd that this should be considered suspicious behavior, and I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that it's not a customary charge against customers who do the bidding of the clerks.

Disagreed. At the root we have a clerk who thought an item went in that didn't come out, and a questioning about it.

We can only surmise certain things, but as long as we're imagining what might have happened, we might imagine that if the account of the management is true, and the customers were believed to be acting suspiciously, it's quite possible the clerk acted from the start as one might expect a sales clerk to act when confronting people she already suspects of misbehavior.

And this has been my argument all along. If management's account is plus or minus accurate, and for that matter if the women's account is three-quarters accurate, this is a non-story. It's only if we accept Bedard's claimed psychic powers to just know that she received unfair treatment specifically because she was black does the story have any legs at all. Absolute worst case scenario, assuming everything Bedard says is true: there is a mildly racist employee at some boutique.

Remember that although we cannot know how everyone behaved, gestured, looked, and so forth, we do know from the account given that the suspicion preceded any confrontation.

Yes. Suspicion of shoplifting is a day-to-day reality in retail. Sometimes a clerk might even approach a customer about it. Sometimes the clerk will be dead wrong. And?

Of course it's possible that the whole incident was not racially motivated, or that, if it was, it was not intentionally so. But if it was not, then at the very least the business owners had better straighten out their act, because their employees are acting in such seriously conflicting ways that a prudent customer would be well advised to avoid the place.

Sooo....honkey-dorey to publicly make an unfounded claim of racism and organize a boycott and protest to destroy a business? A prudent customer should avoid the place because, you know, something is going on there. Ok, no further arguments from yours truly.

 

[Thermal]

No, I don't believe the clerk ever thought she directly saw an additional dress at any time, mistakenly or otherwise.

Well, you do say 'believe', as opposed to 'think', so kudos for that.

 

[Thermal]

Of course not; and neither will I accept "oops, I accidentally saw five dresses when there were really only four and had to call the police on them for stealing, understandable mistake!" to be an acceptable excuse for the disruption to their lives that these two women faced as a consequence.

I really don't understand this line of reasoning. People get mistakenly accused of things all the time. I once was arrested and sat in a holding cell for five hours accused of B&E. It was a mistake on the part of the person who called it in, who did not know what I was doing on a property. Sucked for me at the time, but feces occurs. Are people supposed to be magically immune from the effects of occasional mistakes? Do you think that if Bedard and her daughter didn't get so unreasonably hostile, it might have been resolved immediately, perhaps even with profuse apologies from the clerk for her mistake (see CORed's anecdote upthread)?

 

[Thermal]

This is getting scary. Thermal, I agree with your stance on this 100%. You are virtually the only person in this thread thinking rather than feeling - maybe I missed a few others. This is a skeptics site and wow what a disappointment this forum is becoming.

People have condemned her as racist with zero - ZERO evidence to support it. ZEE-ROW. In fact this is the case with almost all the similar stories posted on this forum in the past few weeks.

And we jump straight to racism, not prejudice, not stupidity, not maybe the customers actually were a-holes. Instant racism. The ink isn't even dry on this story yet. And it's always the same posters which tells me a lot. We NEED this to be racism dammit! We need as many reasons as possible to hate you white Trump people that caused this county to go into a racist tailspin! That's all it is.

I'm not siding with anyone because there is not enough information, and frankly this is not news to me. If you wanna prove racism is on the rise surely you can find more clear-cut examples than these? What a joke.

Thanks, and I'm not siding with anyone either, for the same reasons. I am siding against the gratuitous assumption of racism where, as you say, dead zero evidence of it is shown.

 

[Mumbles]

Yeah, and what about the black on black violence that vastly outnumbers the cops?

Oh **** I ********** up again. I keep forgetting black lives only have to matter to white people.

Or, alternately, you just never searched for "stop the violence", "anti-violence rally", or any other term that would quickly show you that these matters have been taken seriously in black communities (including by many BLM groups) for decades, and instead just immediately and falsely assumed that activists are all operating in bad faith.

 

[ddt]

Has it already been mentioned that the daughter is mixed-race? (the father is white)

 

[Silly Green Monkey]

The clerk who saw items go in wasn't the same clerk who saw items come out, which is part of the problem.

 

[Checkmite]

I really don't understand this line of reasoning. People get mistakenly accused of things all the time. I once was arrested and sat in a holding cell for five hours accused of B&E. It was a mistake on the part of the person who called it in, who did not know what I was doing on a property. Sucked for me at the time, but feces occurs.

You are entitled to not care about such an inconvenience. The fact that you made that decision for yourself however doesn't mean that people who decided differently are unreasonable.

Are people supposed to be magically immune from the effects of occasional mistakes? Do you think that if Bedard and her daughter didn't get so unreasonably hostile, it might have been resolved immediately, perhaps even with profuse apologies from the clerk for her mistake (see CORed's anecdote upthread)?

I don't see any reason to agree with this victim-blaming logic. The store employee responsible had concluded that the two women were shoplifters - sorry, possible shoplifters - before any words whatsoever were exchanged, based on what she decided was "furtive behavior" on their part; their response cannot have been responsible for that decision. You propose that suspicion would be assuaged if the victims had only nicely and politely denied being shoplifters when accused; call me cynical, but that sounds fairly ridiculous to me. A nice response would not have changed the "fact" that the employee supposedly saw a different number of garments come out of the changing room compared to what had gone in. The store employee would still have requested the victims reveal the contents of their shopping bag, and a perfectly reasonable refusal of that request would have still led to a demand that they not leave the store and wait for police to arrive. The situation would have escalated in the same way.

"You went into that dressing room with five items, and you only brought four out. What did you do with the fifth?"

[kind smile]"Oh no, dearie, there only four. I promise I'm not stealing the fifth item."

"Ah - my mistake, carry on then."

 

[fuelair]

Yeah, and what about the black on black violence that vastly outnumbers the cops?

Oh **** I ********** up again. I keep forgetting black lives only have to matter to white people.

Minor logic problem you may have missed: there is no reason not to decry both but one of the two was not involved in this case.

 

[fuelair]

First rule of retail shopping. If you are just browsing without a clear idea of what you are looking for, a salesperson will immediately appear. If you are interested in a particular item and want to ask some questions, a salesperson will be nowhere they can be found, or busy with another customer.

A good point and one I have also run into.

 

[sadhatter]

Minor logic problem you may have missed: there is no reason not to decry both but one of the two was not involved in this case.

Didn't see any part of my post that said it was either or. Actually if you read it for comprehension you would have understood this is the exact thing I am saying.

But the proof is in the eating. I'd wager for every ten "white guy does bad thing to black guy" thread there will be maybe one if even for black on black violence. Even though this is statically a much bigger incidence.

Goes against the knee jerk "actually these topics are discussed as much" claim being made.

It's like the guy who is always poor. He spends 10 dollars a month on candy and 500 on cigarettes. He then decides to cut candy out of his budget. Yes this will help but it is certainly not the biggest issue. And anyone would tell him this.

But add race in and suddenly is rude to say if you want to make rent cut out the smokes.

 

[Thermal]

You are entitled to not care about such an inconvenience. The fact that you made that decision for yourself however doesn't mean that people who decided differently are unreasonable.

Oh, I cared. Still do. But I would think that considering yourself to be somehow isolated from the mistakes of others to be unreasonable, yes.

If a cop questions you because you match the description of a suspected criminal, can you ignore him, proclaiming that your asserted innocence is sufficient?

I don't see any reason to agree with this victim-blaming logic. The store employee responsible had concluded that the two women were shoplifters - sorry, possible shoplifters - before any words whatsoever were exchanged, based on what she decided was "furtive behavior" on their part; their response cannot have been responsible for that decision. You propose that suspicion would be assuaged if the victims had only nicely and politely denied being shoplifters when accused; call me cynical, but that sounds fairly ridiculous to me. A nice response would not have changed the "fact" that the employee supposedly saw a different number of garments come out of the changing room compared to what had gone in. The store employee would still have requested the victims reveal the contents of their shopping bag, and a perfectly reasonable refusal of that request would have still led to a demand that they not leave the store and wait for police to arrive. The situation would have escalated in the same way.

"You went into that dressing room with five items, and you only brought four out. What did you do with the fifth?"

[kind smile]"Oh no, dearie, there only four. I promise I'm not stealing the fifth item."

"Ah - my mistake, carry on then."

Please consider CORed's anecdote again. Questioned by a hostile, suspicious worker. CORed realized what the misconception was and made a small effort to clear it up quickly. Worker apologized for her mistake. Done and done. Why should this be so an unreasonable way of handling such a situation?