When you order a pizza, there are a couple of things you can come to expect when it's time to pick up your pizza, whether that be at the counter or at home. Besides the pizza (obviously), you can expect some dipping sauces, you can expect those little tables that help keep your pizza from being a mushy mess, and you can expect a receipt.
Usually, that receipt has your name, right? That's what 20-year-old Myasia Nelson thought when she walked into a Domino's location in Burlington, North Carolina. Nelson, who is black, went to the location with her family to pick up her order of two pizzas plus a side of chicken, but when her name came up on the board for her to collect her order, Myasia saw that the name that came up was not her name.
“I looked up, and I pointed it out to my sister. She didn’t believe me at first because the whole picture went away to the Domino’s advertising screen,” Nelson recalls of the moment where she realised what had happened. “It popped back up. That is when I was in shock.”
Nelson went to the counter to speak to the manager about why her name on the order had been replaced with a misspelled racial slur. The manager, identified by the Burlington Times as Russell Brady, reportedly laughed about the incident, saying that the slur was little more than a spelling mistake.
"The employee said he couldn’t hear what she was saying, he asked her twice, and apparently he just didn’t know how to spell it and punched in something is what he said," says Junior Snyder, the district manager for Domino’s.
"Trying to say it was a misspelling — I don’t know where he got that from," Nelson said, whose name was replaced with a misspelled version of the N-Word. "… I am being told he didn’t know how to spell, and then I am being told that it was a misspelling and all these other excuses."
Synder says that Brady has now lost his job as a result of the racial slur. "That is not who we are nor what we put up with," he stated. "We investigated after we were told, and we let the employee go. It is not who we are, and it is not what we do. We don’t tolerate it, and are not going to tolerate it."
"We did let the gentleman go, he no longer works for our company. I apologized to them several times and all I can do is make sure it doesn’t happen again and train and make sure everyone understands we don’t tolerate this."
By way of apology, Domino's offered Nelson a $50 gift card, but Nelson rejected it out of hand. Even though she was a longtime fan, Nelson says she'll never eat Domino's Pizza again. "My name is worth more than $50," explained Nelson. "I am not what he called me. I was pretty hurt. I felt disrespected I never thought it was going to happen to me. I learned my lesson from that."
