A Taco Bell cashier in Pennsylvania has been fired after printing a racial slur on a customer’s receipt.
In Young Lee, 25, stopped by a Taco Bell in Philadelphia after a night out with friends.
Lee said he had a normal interaction with the clerk, but when he saw his receipt he noted something that outraged him.
Lee decided to confront the cashier who took his order, but that employee added insult to injury.
“I was so infuriated that I couldn’t help but to confront the cashier,“ Lee wrote. ”When I confronted him, he said that there are three Steve’s in the restaurant so he needed to differentiate. It made me even more upset that he was protecting his case rather than apologizing so I lashed out and told him that it is extremely disrespectful to use such a derogatory slur.”
The cashier eventually apologized to Lee, but before long, he could hear the same employee making fun of him with other workers and using the word “chink” again.
“He used the word chink again and they were joking about it,” Lee told CBS Philly.
The racially charged jokes pushed Lee over the edge. He went up to the counter, yelled at the crew and snatched his order from one of the workers’ hands.
The manager came up to Lee to apologize for the slur but told him that it was disrespectful to snatch the food out of the employee’s hands.
“The manager tried to calm me down, he said I was being disrespectful by snatching my food. I was dumbfounded,” Lee says.
“It was as if he was trying to defuse the situation by redirecting the blame on to me,” he added.
Taco Bell fired the employee after Lee posted about his encounter on Facebook.
“We do not tolerate this behavior. This employee no longer works for the brand, and the franchise is retraining its staff to ensure this incident will not happen again,“ the company wrote in a statement. ”Management has reached out and apologized directly to the customer.”
Lee hopes his unpleasant encounter serves as a lesson on how words can affect other people.
“I want people to be more aware of what they are thinking, what their behaviors are like,” Lee said to CBS.
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