A woman in Illinois is seeking to escalate a complaint to corporate after a Whole Foods cashier allegedly made a remark about her five-year-old son that she found racially offensive while they were checking out at the store.
In a TikTok video, the mother recounted that she and her son had gone grocery shopping at the Orland Park location and had picked up several items, including bananas. When they got to the register, the cashier, whom she described as an older white woman, looked at her son and allegedly asked, “Are you the monkey all these bananas are for?”
The woman said the comment caught her off guard. “It threw me for a loop, because I was like, what did you just say?” she said in the video. She claims the cashier repeated the question a second time, again referring to the child as a “monkey.”
‘I Didn’t React in the Way I Wanted to’
When the mother asked the employee not to call her son that, the cashier responded that her son was “a beautiful boy.” Peeved that the older woman had not apologized, she completed her purchase and left with her son before later calling the store to report the incident to a manager. “I didn’t react in the way I wanted to,” she said. “But I knew in the back of my mind when I left, something was going to be done.”
While she said the manager apologized on behalf of the cashier, she felt unsettled again when he allegedly suggested the remark might have been intended in a playful way rather than as a harmful comment.
The woman said she was offended that the manager had “tried to make an excuse” for the cashier and told him she would be taking the complaint further with corporate. “I definitely need to take it higher, because there’s no way you can make an excuse for that. You were better off just apologizing and moving on from it. But he didn’t,” she said.
She later stated that she has emailed the company and is now waiting for a response.
Netizens’ Reactions to the Illinois Whole Foods Incident
There have been mixed reactions online following her post, with some viewers interpreting the remark as insensitive but not intentionally racist. One person wrote, “Not everything is racist. Poor choice of words on her part, but if she was an older woman, kids of all races were called ‘little monkeys’ when I grew up in the 60s and 70s.”
Another commenter echoed a similar sentiment, saying, “Definitely inappropriate on the cashier’s part, but I don’t think she was intentionally trying to be racist. The fact that she repeated it a second time and called him a beautiful boy after doesn’t seem like this was a hate crime.”
Others, however, felt the comment crossed a clear line regardless of intent. “That’s disgusting. Definitely need to take steps to bring this to justice,” one netizen wrote, while another added, “Take it to the highest level, this is definitely not acceptable 😣.”
