Papa John’s Apologizes For Racist Receipt, Fires Employee
On Saturday Harlem resident Minhee Cho tweeted a picture of her Papa John’s receipt with the message “Hey @PapaJohns just FYI my name isn’t ‘lady chinky eyes.’ It didn’t take long for other Twitter users to start retweeting the picture of the racist Papa John’s receipt and now the company has responded.
After apologizing profusely on Twitter and Facebook the company has fired the 16-year old high school girl who put the name on the receipt. @PapaJohns tweeted, “We are very upset by recent receipt issue in New York & sincerely apologize to our customer. Franchise employee involved is being terminated.”
While Papa John’s has apologize their ignorant manager Jerome told the Post:
“I think the lady put it out there just to get some attention—some people like that type of attention” while he added, “I truly don’t think it’s fair. It’s been taking up all our time. It’s been very disruptive.”
The stores assistant manager echo’s Jerome’s sentiment:
“We’re all of different races here in this store. So she didn’t mean any harm, didn’t mean to stereotype against her, to discriminate against her, but that’s how she took it.”
Jerome then agreed with the assistant manager:
“It’s a busy place, and it was a way to identify her and her order. You know, we do stuff like that sometimes. We’ll write ‘the lady with the blue eyes’ or ‘the guy in the green shirt.”
If anything Jerome seemed more upset that it called a disruption to his employees:
“It’s affecting how we work. This is a place of business. I truly don’t think it’s fair what she did; it’s just crazy.”
Cho says she was surprised by the name on her receipt because as she told the Daily News:
“I was very surprised because the lady that was serving me was super nice and we joked and it seemed super normal.”
For her part Cho says Jerome was right that she wanted to show her friends and shame Papa John’s for calling her lady chinky eyes.
Do you think Minhee Cho created an overblown reaction to the receipt?
