When you fall in love with a specific beauty product, you typically keep going back for it. That’s what one man in Kansas did when he started using Rhode brand’s lip treatment. He would go to Sephora specifically to pick up his favorite product. However, an interaction he recently had at a local Sephora turned him off from the store forever. He felt like the worker he dealt with was being racist and discriminatory toward him.
Timothe (@timothehoward) shared a TikTok video describing a discriminatory interaction he had at Sephora that changed his mind about the store forever. When Timothe went into the store, he asked the sales associate if they had his favorite product, Rhode vanilla peptide lip treatment. The sales associate tells him that they don’t have that in stock. However, when he walks over to the area where he usually finds it, he finds that the product is in stock. That was the first thing that seemed weird to him.
When Timothe approaches the check-out counter and taps to pay for his product, the associate asks if he wants a bag. He says “no” and reaches for the peptide. However, when he reaches for the product, the associate takes it and pulls it away from him. She looks shocked that he tried to reach for it while his payment was already being processed. Timothe was turned off by the entire interaction, realizing there was probably a racist undertone.
However, it gets even worse. In an even bigger act of discrimination, the associate says she was worried he would snatch the product. She says he may try to “run out of the store” without paying. But he already paid!! Timothe wondered how, when “we are at the end of the transaction?!” He felt like he was being completely discriminated against based on the color of his skin, since he’s a black male. It’s pathetic that individuals need to worry about this and those in customer service being blatantly racist toward them. Now, Timothe says he won’t return to Sephora again – and after that, who could blame him?
One commenter shared with Timothe, “Sephora is like this boo. It’s normalized racism there.” Another commenter stated, “I would have just asked for a refund at that point.” It sounds to me like Timothe will be taking his business elsewhere, which is probably for the best. Why give a company your business when they can’t treat a customer right?
