It's All About Education

Every time I open my Facebook page, Google alerts, or some other news source and find a notice like the one I read today from Georgia, I’m once again dumbfounded, aghast, and horrified.  This time, it’s not about the employee who yelled and screamed a mother, her child and his service dog out of their convenience store, although that did happen.  (Effectively making it an inconvenience store instead).

While the employee’s reaction is offensive enough on its own merit, this time it is about the response of QT Convenience stores’ corporate spokesperson.  After the incident, they issued the following statement:  “If QT made a mistake, we apologize. We recognize all service dogs in our stores. Our training manuals reflect this. If we must, we may go back and retrain the employee so he understands our procedure.”

IF we made a mistake?  This is an unbelievable, placating, self-serving, “oh, we really didn’t do anything wrong”, statement.  It certainly is not an apology.  If the company’s training manual appropriately addresses service dogs and the Americans with Disabilities Act, wouldn’t they know that the employee had made a “mistake”?  Wouldn’t they jump at the chance to right this wrong?

Read the entire story here.   What are your thoughts?