I was fortunate after my Mother, Barbara D. Letherwood, a Widow at 25 years old, with five children, no Family, with a Southern 8th grade education (there were no High Schools in most of the South if you were a Negro), in a strange city (I was 10 years old and the eldest) , bought a house at 3538 North 14th Street, Milwaukee, WI and we never had to move again until we were grown and gone. Thanks forever Mother!!! After graduating from Keefe Avenue Elementary three years later I attended Rufus King High School in 1964 and a year later as a Sophomore, along with two of my closest friends, Rashad (Russell) Graham and Jamil (James Allen) Muhammad was hired as a cashier/stocker at Walgreens, then located at 3rd and North Avenue (and later at the Walgreens on 12th Vliet Street). One of the first things you were taught was basic Customer Service, e. g. how to greet a customer, receive money, count change back and to say thank you. I have patronized Whole Foods grocery from the time I lived in Atlanta, GA in the 80’s, to Milwaukee & Madison, WI from 05 to 2014, Chicago, IL, Indianapolis, IN, Denver, CO, and several stores in Phoenix, AZ. While patronizing the Whole Foods on University Avenue in Madison this morning where I’m visiting for a week, I experienced something that I have a hard time fathoming, and it is not the first time. I bought a single serve bottle of Uncle Matt’s Organic Orange Juice for $1.99 and gave the clerk, a 20 something, Caucasian female $2.04 cents, she counted several times and attempted to give me the .04 cents back, and I said, “just enter it into the register and it will tell what change to give back”, she put the four pennies in a container filled with rubber bands as though I was giving her a tip, and I said, “no, you owe me five cents”, and she still looked befuddled as I walked away shaking my head in amazement. Now this is not a poor African-America person, from the hood, suffering from the “achievement gap”. No, this person went to the best schools, has much privilege, has an android phone and knows how to navigate her way from a Mac to any IBM, Dell, HP, etc. but can’t compute in her head a less than $5.00 transaction. As Whoopi Goldberg and Paul Mooney would say respectively, “What the Hell?”, “It’s The End Of The World”, not definitively, but as we once knew it.
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 17:07:38 +0000
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