.
Good question.
Not so fast. You may have that option, you may not.
Most establishments will toss you out if you insult their staff. They may refuse to serve you if you take that position. If you insult a customer service representative by phone, they are allowed to disconnect.
I know many places will fawn and bend over backwards to do anything to make that customer happy. Wal-Mart comes to mind, but do NOT push it. You misbehave in a store and you are OUT of there. Maybe with a security guard escort.
I remember a gay friend of mine, a waiter, came home one night and announced he'd quit. I asked him WHY??? He was working in a pretty nice restaurant nearby and had just applied there recently.
Apparently, he went up to a table and this guy's girlfriend thought she was being cute and said, "we want another server, we are afraid you might give us AIDS."
He walked out because he didn't want to have to deal with this when no one at the establishment even knew him yet. He figured they would just think he was going to be trouble if the restaurant's clients were this kind of moron.
If he were in his normal haunts and that had happened, the owner would have tossed those creeps out on their butts. He worked in a lot of great places that would not have tolerated that from any customer.
So, no one is going to sue if you refuse to serve them if they deserve getting declined, because they are behaving improperly. .
There are (at least) three levels to this:
Level 1 -- It's not OK. Bigotry is bigotry. However, our moral objections to bigotry intersect with our moral approval of freedom of choice. It's difficult to see how we could allow people to choose NOT to patronize a restaurant because they don't like the food, or think the prices are too high, and yet somehow prevent them from making the same choice because they don't like the Lower Elbonian owners.
Level 2 -- Related to the above, when someone is serving the public, there is an asymmetric power relationship going on. For one "server" the loss of one customer is usually not an existential threat. In many instances, for a customer to be denied by a server, the potential loss could be catastrophic (e.g. if the server is the water utlity, the only available trauma surgeon, or the only gas station in a 50-mile radius). Hence, servers necessarily must be held to more egalitarian standards.
Level 3 -- I read this in a criticism of Objectivism/Libertarianism, but it applies to this question Let's imagine Joe owns/operates Joe's Diner, and Joe doesn't want to serve Lower Elbonians. Despite his very public sign "No Lower Elbonians Served" sign, a Lower Elbonian comes into Joe's Diner. Joe basically has three choices at that point:
A) Refuse to serve the Elbonian but allow the Elbonian to occupy the business property
B) Attempt to use persuasion or violence to get the Elbonian to leave
C) Call the police
Scenario A is problematic because it does not scale. OK, if Akbar occupies a counter seat at Joe's, maybe enough other customers can keep Joe in business. But what if Akbar gets Jeff and a dozen other Elbonians to also occupy Joe's Diner, Joe either has to serve the Elbonians, or risk losing is business. It becomes a game of "chicken." Is that how we want society to operate?
Scenario B is problematic because if the Elbonian(s) refuses to leave, it becomes a contest of will and/or weaponry. Are we really prepared to have a society where vigilante violence in defense of prejudice is the norm?
Scenario C is the real rub. To avoid questions of discrimination being settled by mob rule and/or vigilante violence, we agree to let the cops intervene. So, in order for Joe's Diner to discriminate against Lower Elbonians while civil order is maintained, the police have to intervene in defense of Joe's bigotry. Is THAT a society we want?
To sum it up, in order to permit "servers" to discriminate without societal chaos, the state has to employ its legal power to enforce the discrimination. It's either that, or don't permit servers to discriminate. On both moral and practical grounds (it's much easier to force one diner owner to obey the law than 20 Lower Elbonian protesters), prohbitions on discrimination win.
I should have a contest having everyone guess places in America that are totally comfortable posting this sign.
It sounds a bit hypocritical, doesn't it?
That's disgusting...and Randy would have a field day with the poor grammar/punctuation...;-D...
And the hits just keep on coming.
Restaurant racism revealed as 40% of waiters admit they discriminate against black customers because they 'don't tip well'
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2134200/Restaurant-racism-revealed-40-waiters-admit-discriminate-black-customers-dont-tip-well.html#ixzz4Fvk4SOu3
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Hey, that survey is from North Carolina, the very same state with the LGBT bathroom choice freak out law, and the one whose "election integrity/Voter ID" law was just struck down for targeting African-Americans.
But, nope. No bigotry there...;-D....
I hate to say it, but that WAS a common complaint when I worked as a waitress in Chicago.
Not everyone thinks it is unacceptable for a business owner to refuse to serve anyone he or she chooses. I said business owner. And of course, people can spend their money where they choose.
No. When the whole HR/EO legal environment was new in the 1960s, barbershops posted signs that they could not honor requests for a barber based on race, sex, etc. Hospitals often deal with patients who insist on "their" color of doctor, and it is an "open secret" that hospitals often quietly honor such requests just to avoid a scene. Still, a swastika-tattooed father's insistence on no black nurses touching his newborn resulted in a 2013 lawsuit against the Michigan hospital. Simply put, if a customer makes a request to be served by someone of a certain religion/race/gender/orientation, and the business honors that request, then the business becomes vulnerable to discrimination suits.
None of that prevents any more subtle discrimination, consciously or otherwise, on the part of clients. White restaurant servers often say they get poor tips from black customers. Vice-versa, sometimes black servers of predominantly white customers will compare their tips to those of white servers, and find theirs come up short. Tipping behavior is strongly cued by whether the paying customer sees servers "like themselves". Several studies have borne this out.
That's not what I'm referring to. The situation where the waiter walked out is closer to it, though.
Maybe I worded this wrong. Let's say the restaurant is owned by Lower Elbonians and Joe walks in. Joe says "I won't let you people touch my food," and he leaves. Why does Joe get to do this with impunity?
Yes.
That sign is a poorly-done version of a hoax that has been going around for years. Some renditions of the hoax include McDonald's insignia to make the notice look semi-official. In the case of your posting, the spelling is so poor that it would be hard to believe such a sign could be cranked out by someone who is functioning in the working world, Secondly, no restaurant operator is going to cover promotional graphics with something so blatantly sloppy. Someone creates or writes the bogus sign, tapes it to a restaurant window, photographs it, and passes it off as real. Only the low-information crowd would swallow the hoax hook, line, and sinker without investigating.
The reason why I asked this is because a friend of mine runs a handyman business. An employee went into a home recently and was performing a job. The client was talking to the employee while he worked. The client asked how many kids the employee has and the employee said he has five. The client said, "What are you, X religion?" The employee indicated he is. The client then told the employee to leave mid-job and not to come back. Where would the law fall on this? It's clear religious discrimination, but it's the inverse of what we normally hear about. And, laws aside, is this something society is cool with? Why? How is it different?
But this only relates to companies permitting discrimination. I posted the example that spurred my thoughts as a reply to ThriftyMaid, above. The customer did not request a new employee. They just cancelled their order. Where does this sort of thing fall in the chain of moral acceptability and legality?
@JA -- Please revisit the Levels 1 and 2 subanswers. It's not morally OK, but such behavior is almost impossible to legally sanction.
You're right. You did address it. I guess I still feel like I'm missing half the answer. It just doesn't feel like that's enough. Not your answer... you explained it very well and it's probably accurate from a behavioral standpoint, but it still feels wrong and bothers me.
@DTT -- Thank you for providing the link. I had some suspicion the sign was a hoax, but in a country where a large plurality of people openly admit they think President Obama is a Muslim, my BS detector for over-the-top bigotry has trouble calibrating. My zero-information guesses for the sign would have been:
A) A particularly dumb pissed-off individual franchise owner
B) An individual franchise owner putting it up as a political joke to make a statement about...something (maybe affirmative action?)
Hoax would have been my third choice.
As for your claim no functional business owner/employee would make such mistakes...Sorry, I've been to enough rodeos to see PLENTY of dumb people and/or poor grammarians at all levels of business.
One action is a matter of public record, and the other is a personal choice. A business owner who says "We ain't gonna serve your kind here!" is engaging in a public act when they state that refusal. US law requires that if you advertise your business publicly, and you're not a private club or subscription-only organization then you must serve everyone equally. It's not possible to police everyone's internal thoughts. Someone who says -for example- "I ain't want to eat no barbecue that's cooked up by some n****r" is making a private decision.
That sounds very unusual to me. I'm an atheist but have no problem with Catholics. I actually have a great deal of respect for Vatican 2 Catholics who are strong believers in charity and good works and who are strong supporters of Pope Francis.
I think that might be a case where the person having the work done was just a nut. That might be a matter of individual peccadillos rather than any societal construct.
I work in a library and we permit Tea Party people there, so long as they don't start yelling at the librarians and calling them "God damn lazy, useless government employees". (That actually only happened one time and the guy was also clearly drunk so the police were called and he was banned from the library for a period of one year).
Because humans aren't omnipotent like Dogbert. It would be impossible to enforce any such statute, and the costs of trial and litigation would be outrageous.
