Papa John's Apologizes for Calling Customer 'Lady Chinky Eyes'
Restaurant chain Papa John’s is facing controversy after a racial slur was printed on a customer receipt and went viral.
The offensive receipt, which identified customer Ms. Cho as 'lady chinky eyes," was issued at a Harlem, NY restaurant on Friday.
The communications manager at ProPublica, Minhee Cho, who is of South Korean origin, was shocked by the way the employee identified her on her receipt and later posted a picture on her Twitter account.
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“Hey @PapaJohns just FYI my name isn’t ‘lady chinky eyes’,” Cho wrote on her Twitter page.
The picture has already been viewed over 200,000 times and has sparked numerous comments against the inappropriate comment.
Papa John’s took to the social media website to apologize profusely to Ms. Cho and responded to Tweets by other people condemning the comment.
“Please know the employee has been terminated & a formal apology has been given. We’ve also reach out to customer personally,” Papa John’s tweeted to Twitter user MeghabMBiro.
The company also told CNN that the act “goes against our company values,” and apologized for the customer’s experience at its establishment.
The worker who wrote the comment was a local teenager, and a manager at the restaurant attempted to explain the slur by telling The New York Post that the employee meant no harm by his comment.
“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,’” he said.
Despite the public apology, Cho told The Post that she would not likely be going back into that Papa John’s restaurant any time soon.
“I probably would not go there again, because they would probably spit in my food,” she said. “I live in Harlem; this is normal.”
