A recent disagreement with an unruly customer in Macy's escalated, until the man in question went on a rant directed at the employees and other customers around him. The man apparently became angry when an employee in the Texas store told him they couldn't gift wrap a purse he intended to buy in that part of the store, but things took a turn once he heard one employee talk to their colleague in Arabic.
Part of the incident was caught on video by another customer, who shared it on Twitter (his tweets are now protected). “I really walked into a Twitter video irl today,” Ricky wrote on Tuesday. “This man made two women cry after publicly humiliating them.”
The video begins with a female shopper defending the employee. “Leave the store, she already told you,” the woman says. “There’s not a gift box for that. Leave! … You’re disrespecting her.”
“I don’t need to do sh*t,” he replies, before asking the manager to call security. “She’s interfering with my purchase."
“He demanded they give him a box for free with his purchase, but the lady informed him it doesn’t come with one and that she could send him upstairs to have it wrapped, but he refused,” Ricky explained to Yahoo Lifestyle. “No one really paid attention to him until he brought up ethnicity.”
“Hey, I don’t speak Arabic. They were speaking Arabic,” the man said, before going off into a rant about the language the employees were speaking - despite the fact they weren't addressing him at that time. “Hey, I’m in America, I want people to speak English to me,” he added. “All I asked was for her to do was speak English.”
You can see the incident in the video below:
“Is this some kind of TV show going on right now? Because I can’t believe you’re going to sit here and talk to somebody because you don’t understand them," another bystander points out. "They were talking to each other, right? Were they talking to you?”
Eventually, the employee agreed to give the man a box for the purse he bought despite the fact it wasn't their policy, but by that point other customers were criticising and mocking him for what he had said, coming to the defence of the women he had berated.
“Get these customers away from me,” the man said to the spectators. “All the Arabs, all you Arabs and Democrats. Go back to where you came from … how many Arabs came out of the woodwork?”
“Overall, it wasn’t a pretty situation, but it truly made my day seeing a crowd of people, who are not shown in the video, stand up for what’s right,” Ricky explained, finding a positive spin to the incident.
A Macy’s spokesperson said of the incident, “We believe our Macy’s employees and customers should be treated with dignity, respect and kindness. We aim to create a welcoming environment, and we apologize for what occurred in our store. We are investigating this incident.”
