When a customer walked into a CVS pharmacy in Richmond, VA on Thanksgiving day, looking to purchase cheese, he was certainly not expecting to have the police called on him.
Rick Berry and his roommate Phillip Blackwell entered the CVS on Thursday, where they asked an employee if they carried sliced cheese. The cashier told Berry and his roommate that they did not, but their interaction did not stop there. Shortly after, Berry noticed that all of the employees, including the one he had just spoken to, were missing. After about half an hour of being alone in the store with just one other customer, police arrived.
“We were walking around trying to find an employee, and the cop himself ended up opening the emergency door, which set the alarm off,” Berry said. “A couple of minutes later, he got the call from the alarm company asking what was going on.”
The police officer soon found all of the employees huddled and hiding in the store’s backroom. After making a few calls, the pair were asked to leave, per the employees’ request.
Berry notes that the officer remained friendly and was only doing what was asked.
“He just told us we need to leave the premises or else we would be arrested for trespassing, and that flipped the script on all of us,” Berry told the local news station. “We had no idea what was going on.”
“We’re being kicked out because they were scared of us and hiding,” Berry said in one the Snapchat videos.
CVS has not made an official statement, but says they are aware of the incident. “We are aware of this incident and we have since spoken with the customer to apologize,” said CVS on Twitter. “CVS has a firm non-discrimination policy and we do not tolerate the profiling of customers in any manner. Based on our investigation, this matter did not involve racial profiling and we are taking appropriate corrective action with the employee involved.”
According to CVS, they are also working on retraining the employee who called the police.
Do you think this was a case of racial profiling?
