When you’re a regular at your favorite store, so much so that you opted for those special customer cards, and then you get profiled, that stings. You’d think your face would be recognized by some people, right? One California black man recorded that very encounter. While he was checking out at Home Depot, which he visited often, an employee accused him of stealing something. He not only walked away with no harm, no foul, but got a sweet deal in the process.
TikToker Jo_crzy, Jo, captured the profiling on video. A Home Depot employee wanders up to the self-checkout where he was doing his business and starts checking items for him. He instructs her to “count the items” because he sees she might be punching them in incorrectly. It looked like he was doing it just fine, too. Instead, she double-checks his work because she thought she saw something while “she was standing back there.”
Despite Jo’s protesting that he got everything right, the employee is the one who wants the manager. Jo waves it aside, unbothered, “Call whoever you want.” It’s going to show the same number of items regardless.
What is getting worse is the employee, who tells Jo to “calm down,” despite him being very level throughout the heckling. Telling people to calm down just makes the situation worse, especially when the person you’re telling is in the wrong. Also, how would you react to being accused of stealing? Not very calm, probably. Jo’s is cooler than most people.
The employee counts his items in front of him and proves that he was right about how many he scanned. He hilariously says to her, “I don’t get nothing for my inconvenience, huh? But I’m stealing, right?”
A manager steps in later in the video to assist Jo with the conundrum. Jo explains, “She came over to me. She says she’s seeing me put items in the bag that I did not scan. I asked her to count these items.” Jo did the recount in his video—eight items were scanned, and he counted eight items.
When the manager learns how the employee was treated, he apologizes on her behalf. He then tells Jo, “We’ll give you a discount or something.” That’s the least they could do for being an inconvenience.
One commenter prompted him, “And do the survey on the receipt! Make sure you put her name and how horrible the experience was.” On top of that, she never even apologized for the false accusation and for how she treated him.
Another commenter, one who claimed they had “years in security,” shared that de-escalation was the best way to handle friction. “Staying calm kept the focus where it belonged,” but also made it clear, “Calm doesn’t mean passive.” Jo meant the situation at the appropriate emotional level.
