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Taco Bell Cashier Who Called an Asian Customer ‘Chink’ on Receipt Gets Fired

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    The cashier who called first-year University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. student In Young Lee a racial slur on his receipt was fired from his job at Taco Bell.

    The fast-food chain confirmed the termination of the employee in its statement on Tuesday, according to Associated Press via South China Morning Post.

    Lee visited the Taco Bell branch at Chestnut Street in Philadelphia on Saturday at around 1:30 a.m. after going out with his friends. He then decided to give the cashier a fake name “Steve” to save them the trouble of spelling out his real name. However, Lee was shocked to find “Steve Chink” printed out on the receipt.

    I was so infuriated that I couldn’t help but to confront the cashier. When I confronted him, he said that there are three Steve’s in the restaurant so he needed to differentiate,” Lee wrote in a Facebook post. “It made me even more upset that he was protecting his case rather than apologizing so I lashed out and told him that it is extremely disrespectful to use such a derogatory slur.”

    The cashier eventually apologized to the Penn Medicine student for writing the racial slur on the receipt. Lee decided to let the case go after hearing his explanation, but things took a turn for the worse when he overheard the cashier and other employees making fun of him.

    This is when I snapped and stormed to the counter and started yelling at him,” he said. “This is when the manager approached me to calm me down. He said that what the cashier did to me was wrong and that he is sorry.”

    The manager apologized for the employee’s horrible behavior, but he added that Lee was at fault, too, for being “disrespectful” after he snatched the food out of the cashier’s hands when he was called a “chink.”

    How does he expect me to be polite to the cashier when he deliberately took his time to spell out the word ‘CHINK’ to describe me? When he attempted to condemn me, people in the restaurant started to berate both the manager and the cashier, which led him to apologize and finally admit that they were in the wrong,” he continued on Facebook.

    I thought incidents like this only happen in the news and never expected it to happen to me but I guess it really does happen in the real world. Normally I would let things like this go but under the current political climate I find it very important to address such issues and voice them loudly and clearly.”

    Images via Facebook / livinyounglee

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