Best Buy Apologizes For Tailing Black Stundents In Its Store

[matcom]

<snip>

A top official of Best Buy apologized yesterday to administrators and students at Georgetown Day School for any discriminatory practices at its Tenleytown store and said the company is taking steps to make sure "that all of our customers are treated with dignity and respect."



Bradbury H. Anderson, vice chairman and chief executive of Best Buy Co., said in an e-mail to school officials that the company "fell short" of its code of behavior in dealing with the private school, which complained that its black students have been treated unfairly since the store opened on Wisconsin Avenue NW last fall.

"Thank you for alerting us to the situation at our Tenleytown store," Anderson said in the e-mail to Peter Branch, the head of the private school, and Paul H. Levy, principal of its high school. "One of our company's core values is to 'show respect, humility and integrity.' It appears we fell short of our own code of behavior. . . . We apologize" to school officials, faculty and the students.

Levy wrote a letter to Best Buy last month complaining of several incidents of racial discrimination against Georgetown Day's black students, saying employees followed them as they shopped, subjected them to searches and, in one instance, admitted a group of young white students to shop but barred a group of young blacks.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57861-2004Apr30.html

[Fenris]

1. Another reason to shop independent record stores!

[VelmaD]

2. Wouldn't it be nice...

if some people would join us in this century. *sigh*

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

3. I have a problem with this report

I frequent that store. It is nearly entirely operated by black people.

[GOPisEvil]

4. Dammit...why are we still dealing with this crap in 2004?

[vi5]

5. I'm as white as the day is long and they had me frisked.....

2 Years back I bought a cd player and paid with my credit card. I get in my car and am driving through the parking lot when an unmarked police car and a patrol car pull me over. Cops got out and asked me for my ID, what I had been doing in Best Buy, they asked me to step out of the car and frisked me up against said car. Continued badgering me and asking me questions in front of a guy in a Best Buy shirt who was talking on a cell phone. I then see the Best Buy guy whisper to one of the cops who then said "Blue shirt? So this isn't the guy?!?"

Someone at the store had spotted a case of fraud and fingered me, leading them to get the cops who had been watching the store to pull me over and do this to me. All 1 block from my office, in plain view of anyone who was driving by.