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This black man visited Walmart store in Niagara Falls, Ontario on Friday, December 16, 2016 to return unopened merchandise that he purchased 1 week ago. 8 people were ahead of him when he joined the line at Customer Service area. There were 3 Walmart employees behind the counter. Even though there were 3 workstations available, only 1 person was accepting returns. The other 2 were chatting and laughing despite 9 tired and unsatisfied customers were watching them angrily. Their supervisor who will be later seen in the video wearing a white blouse covered by a black jacket and glasses, did not disciplined them at all but rather went further inside the cashier area of the store but still was watching them from about 50 meters away.
After 45 minutes waiting in line, the black man was in front of the customer service counter. At that point all employees that were there left one by one and another woman employee went behind the counter to accept his return. When she checked the returned merchandise and accepted it, the paper in the receipt printing machine ran out. Instead of replacing the paper that she obviously could not do, she asked the man to go home and said he would see the refund in several days on his credit card account. The man did not want to leave the store without a proof of return and a credit receipt as it was supposed to be done according to the Walmart return policy. At that time, she tried to call her supervisor but no one appeared for another 5 minutes.
Eventually another customer went and asked the supervisor, that was described at the beginning, for help at the Customer Service desk. Even though she was watching the events the entire time, she did not want to interfere, and turned a “blind eye” on the disgrace that the black man was facing.
When the supervisor arrived at the customer service desk, she did not take any steps to find out from the employee about the matter of a problem she was experiencing and calm down the upset and frustrated customer by deescalating the situation. She took another approach by asking the employee to leave and started to play “fool” as she was completely unaware of the problem and aggravating the customer to the breakdown point. When he explained to her 2 times the cause of him being frustrated, she ordered him to leave the store without the proof of return receipt and threatened him to be arrested by the police if he does not comply.
Only after that point this video was started to be recorded as a proof of ungrounded reasons for the possible arrest of the black customer by the police.