Minnesota
St. Paul Chipotle offers manager job back in racial stereotyping, dine-and-dash incident
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Chipotle said Monday that the company has offered a fired St. Paul restaurant manager her job back after receiving more information about an incident where employees refused to serve five black men and asked them to prove they could pay before taking their order.
The company said in a statement it has reviewed the evidence and decided to offer the manager her job back. While Chipotle says its protocol was not followed serving these customers, the company publicly apologized to the manager “for being put in this position.”
Employees accused the men of being repeat dine-and-dashers. One of the men, 21-year-old Masud Ali, posted a video of the incident on Twitter on Thursday, alleging that he and his friends were subjected to racial stereotyping.
The video begins with a Chipotle employee telling the men that they must pay “because you never have money when you come in here.” Chipotle fired the restaurant’s manager after the online backlash and said it would retrain employees.
But in a statement Sunday, the company said it has new information that warrants additional investigation.
“Our actions were based on the facts known to us immediately after the incident, including video footage, social media posts and conversations with the customer, manager, and our employees,” Chipotle spokeswoman Laurie Schalow said. “We now have additional information which needs to be investigated further. We want to do the right thing, so after further investigation we will re-train and re-hire if the facts warrant it.”
The company said it was aware of reports about since-deleted tweets that apparently posted on Ali’s account between 2014 and 2016 that included jokes about dining and dashing. Ali didn’t respond to requests for comment from local media outlets.
The company was aware of the alleged tweets when it decided to fire the manager, and the decision to re-evaluate the situation wasn’t influenced by the tweets, Schalow said. She declined to provide details about the new information.
Cynthia Wheeler
November 26, 2018 at 2:09 am
You can’t “dine & dash” when you pay befoe you are given your food. The young men were not accused of a “snatch and grab”. One out of 5 young men had a arrest record, that left 4 men with now history. In the video the lady asks to see money and one young man produes money and I think a second young man. One young man says I eat here everyday, you know I pay. It is very easy to review video tape and see if the history of these young men. It doesn’t matter if all of the ypung men had a history of “dine & dash” ( which they did not) Chipotle is not a resturant in which you eat before you pay. Every media outlet that has published this should hope those other 4 men do not come forward with defamation of character and libel suits because it is common sense that the narrative of “dine & dash” is not posssible