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Sign at Wegmans draws attention | www.WHEC.comIt’s a first for Wegmans in this area. They’ve put up a sign asking customers buying pork or alcohol not to use a particular checkout line when a Muslim teenager is on duty as the cashier.The sign went up a week ago at their Lyell Avenue store.Wegmans says they haven’t gotten any in store complaints and Wegmans was very upfront about the cashier. They just wouldn’t allow us in the store to talk with her or customers.Spokeswoman Jo Natale says the cashier is a teenaged girl who wears a head covering. She told her supervisor she was uncomfortable handling those items because of religious reasons. So the store manager who had experience with this type of situation outside of Rochester decided to put up a small sign whenever the girl was at the checkout counter.It says, “If your order contains pork or alcohol product, we respectfully ask that you choose another lane.”
I'm a native of the Rochester area. My family has been shopping at Wegmans since the size of each location amounted to a mom-and-pop operation, long before these gigantic stores started opening. I like Wegmans as a grocery store, and I like them as an employer. I've never worked for Wegmans, but I know many who have and all of them had wonderful things to say about Wegmans.
As such, this doesn't surprise me at all, and I think it's fantastic. It wasn't extorted out of Wegmans in a courtroom, it wasn't done under threat of extortion. She had a simple request, and for a variety of reasons the management employed a tactic which had been used successfully elsewhere.
As far as I'm concerned, this is just as acceptable as having an express check-out lane. Wegmans being the kind of operation it is, if this actually causes a significant delay for customers (and I doubt it will), all they have to do is open up an additional check-out. Managers do it all the time when it gets busy.