The Customer Is Not Always Right

Especially when they are a bigot and transphobic as one employee found out.

Transgender employee’s firing from Philly coffee shop results in controversy
Philly Voice
By Marielle Mondon
August 24, 2017

Controversy surrounds Function Coffee Labs, a coffee shop in Bella Vista, after its co-owners Ross and Meghan Nickerson terminated a transgender employee who claims the former employee faced ongoing harassment from one of the shop's regular customers.

In a Facebook post from Aug. 15, one Facebook user commented a statement about the events on behalf of the ex-employee, who wished to remain anonymous.

"I am starting a new post, as asked, to share this statement from the employee," the post reads.
In the statement, the ex-employee identifies as a transgender, mixed race person, assigned female at birth and now uses gender-neutral pronouns. The post, in part, read as follows:
"I provide this statement as a neutral and fact-based account of the events that led to my being fired on the evening of August 10, 2017."

“I was fired in response to being harassed and physically threatened by a regular customer. The harassment had been taking place since April. In that time, myself, Ross and Meghan had engaged in two conversations about this individual, as well as the specific difficulties I face as a gender nonconforming person in the service industry.”

The shop owners reply…

The owners wrote that it was not until Aug. 6 that they learned the employee felt threatened and unsafe.

“As we were out of the country for our wedding, we replied on August 10th asking [the former employee] to file a report to the police and stating that we would ask the customer not to return,” they wrote.

“We regret that we did not respond earlier and as a result, our employee was not sufficiently reassured in this matter. Since then, this particular customer has not entered our store but if they do, we will immediately ask them to not return.”

So what is the status of the employee? Are they still fired? Are they welcomed back?

It is hard for a business when a customer harasses a store employee; we are ingrained with “The customer is always right” but that is not always true when the customer is harassing an employee but the employer has a legal duty to provide a safe working environment and one free from discrimination.

The key to this is swap another protected class like race instead gender identity/expression, if the customer was harassing a black employee what would the owner do in that situation? Hopefully, the right thing and throw out the customer.