No Smoothie For You
One of the unseen parts of retail is that you have to always be in a good mood. That is not a problem for me, as I generally find just pretending to be in a good mood puts me in a good mood. It does not matter what the retail worker is going through; all that matters is that the customer is helped as efficiently and sweetly as possible. Either way, having a frown does not accomplish anything. Now all of that is relevant to today’s story.
As I write this, it has been less than a week since there was an incident in Michigan. A couple went into a Smoothie King. The man was wearing a Trump hoodie and was denied service as a result. Naturally, there was a lot of he said, she said during this whole thing, but in the end, the couple was denied service. Later, the two employees were fired and even tried to set up a GoFundMe campaign, which was taken down by the site.
The two employees claim that the couple was unnecessarily hostile and were politely asked to leave. The couple claims that the employees were being inconsiderate and overreacted. It is tempting to view this through a partisan lens, but the underlying issue is the erosion of basic public civility, a trend that ignores party affiliation. Before I moved up here, I worked in an Exxon station in College Station. One night, someone from the restaurant next door came in. He told me that a customer came in wearing a hat depicting a candidate that he did not support. This was around 2017, and I supported this candidate. He wanted to tell this customer off, but had held his tongue. I, likewise, refused to tell him that I felt the same way when someone supported his candidate, but I chose not to. After all, he might have been upset over that.
Now, I am quite torn on this Smoothie King issue. We, as a culture, have been trained to want justice when oppressed. However, just like with gay marriage, where someone can go virtually anywhere to get a cake, this couple did not have to go to this restaurant to get a smoothie. Consistency is the bedrock of a fair society. If we argue that service should be based on non-discrimination mandates, that rule must apply universally— not just when it is politically convenient. If a baker is compelled by the courts to set aside personal conscience to provide a service, it stands to reason that a smoothie franchise should be held to that same standard. We cannot have a system where political conviction is a protected class for some but a liability for others. That is the beauty of the free market, but things have changed in the last ten years.
Let us look at the big picture. I do not know all of the details that happened in Michigan, and there is a lot that was said in the heat of the moment. However, nobody is right if everybody is wrong. Politics has always been heated, but things have changed in the last year. A candidate for the presidency has had at least three assassination attempts. A sitting member of Congress has told two Supreme Court Justices that they “have unleashed the whirlwind and [they] will pay the price.” Many other such threats have been made, too numerous to mention. Refusing service over a hoodie may seem like a triviality, but it signals the end of the public square as a neutral space. If we cannot manage a simple transaction between people of differing views, we lose the ability to coexist as citizens. The responsibility lies with all of us to prioritize basic human courtesy over political signaling, or we risk moving from verbal skirmishes at a smoothie counter to far more dangerous territory.