Maryland Starbucks employee suspended after “Monkey” made name on Black woman’s cup
“I can see from a distance, a barista picks up [my] drink and she looks at it weird, says ‘venti caramel frap’ and backed away,” says Pugh. When she went to pick up her drink, she noticed written on the paper cup, the word “monkey.”
Pugh said, “My heart just drops. It was one of those in-the-moment things where your heart just drops and you’re just like, ‘What?’”
In addition to her name not being on the cup, the order was wrong. Pugh went to another barista and asked him to fix the order. However, instead of trying to accommodate the dissatisfied customer, the she said, he became “very combative and argumentative.”
“If you didn’t hear my name, you should have said, ‘Excuse me, can you repeat yourself?’” Pugh said to the woman’s co-worker. “Not once did she do that. She labeled me what she wanted to label me,” WLBT reported.
She then realized she was the only Black person in the shop and there may be something else going on.
“He and I were going back and forth about whether the drink was made correctly and then I had to stop myself and realized ‘monkey’ was written on my cup,” she said.
“Why am I the only Black person in the store and ‘monkey’ is written on my cup?” Pugh asked, only to be shrugged off by the male barista and told it was a mistake.
“Just with that attitude and his response, oh it’s so triggering,” she says. “Customers were looking at me and I was just embarrassed.”
The employee gave her a refund without apologizing for the “monkey” comment, the messed-up order or his bad attitude.
Pugh immediately contacted customer service about the incident. The first person to reach out to her was the general manager of the location she was violated in.
“This is not a small complaint, it’s not like my coffee was cold or I was missing my croissant,” she says. “And you couldn’t even leave a message without mispronouncing my name.”
The manager said in his message about the location’s commitment to diversity, that he was a man of color, and offered to pay for a free drink and sandwich from the store to make up for the incident.
“I declined it … because that offer felt disrespectful,” Pugh said. “It was disrespectful that he’d say as a Hispanic male he understood and then offered me that.”
The corporate office confirmed that the incident took place and says the person who took the order was disciplined, however, wasn’t fired.
A Starbucks representative told the news, the person was not an official worker of their company, however, was employed by a franchisee, Impeccable Brands. The franchise company has since has initiated its own third-party investigation and will launch diversity and inclusion training for its employees.
After the incident someone allegedly emailed her boss to complain about her after she was on the news as a result of the incident.
“(The email) said I was the reason that that Starbucks employee was fired and I should know what it’s like to be fired because of a race hoax,” the 20-year Starbucks customer said. “However, I am the victim in this situation, that was written on my cup! To ask for the victim to be fired…”
“I can’t even express to you what it felt like to hear my manager read that email aloud to me,” she said.
“I think what made it worse was the events following after,” Pugh stated. “It wasn’t helpful. If anything, it hurt me even more.”
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