Image of the Day: Did Little Caesars single out white customer based on race?

Image of the Day: Did Little Caesars single out white customer based on race?

Imagine that a person of color went into a branch of the chain Little Caesars to order a pizza and was handed a receipt with the hand-written advice that the customer was “black.” There would no doubt be hell to pay.

But the story of a white woman who had that the almost identical experience, different only in terms of race, is generating far less media buzz.

According to Opposing Views, “the woman went to the Fallbrook, California, pizzeria chain on Sept. 18, and ordered a Hawaiian pizza and a pepperoni pizza…. Everything seemed fairly routine until an employee handed over her order with a puzzling receipt taped on top of her pizza box.”

The receipt appears below:

white woman

Ordinarily, there would be attempts to debunk the incident, calling it a “false flag,” but the staff at the restaurant openly admits having written the phrase. A spokeswoman for Little Caesars explained that the counter person understood that “the procedure is to use a customer’s first name to identify them,” but “in haste, wrote the color of the shirt she was wearing, a hyphen and then her gender to identify the customer.”

The customer accepted that explanation — which came with a free order of four large pizzas and breadsticks — acknowledging that “there was no malicious intent.”

Call me cynical. The one detail missing from the account is the race of the staff member who admits making the notation. In this era in which restaurant customers are being denied service on the basis of their being cops and threats against white people in general have become commonplace, I’d be concerned if I were the customer that my pizza had been tampered with. Racist? I suppose … but can you blame me?

Ben Bowles

Ben Bowles

Ben Bowles is a freelance writer and regular contributor to "Liberty Unyielding."

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