STOP ASIAN HATE!
The night of May 2nd, I was shopping with my husband at the Mariano's at 3030 N Broadway in the Lakeview neighborhood, Chicago. Among the items I picked was a watermelon. The store price label said the original price was $6.99, but with membership and digital coupon, the price would be $2.99. During checkout, I noticed that I was incorrectly charged for $6.99 even after entering the membership info. I also doubled check to make sure I had added the coupon. Since it was near the store closing time, I could not find a staff to perform the price adjustment, I decided to pay and take it to the customer service. Upon reaching the customer service, there was nobody to be found. After waiting for at least 5 minutes, I was approached by an employee named Kristina (or Christina), she then aggressively asked me what I wanted. While explaining to her that there was a pricing issue regarding an item I just purchased, she responded with an attitude that she had closed the register and she wouldn't bother to fix it. I proceeded with asking her what can be done to resolve the issue. That's when my husband arrived after taking a picture of the price label. My husband asked me if I still needed the picture as evidence for the price adjustment. That's when Kristina saw my husband, who is of Asian descendent. She then screamed a comment stating, "If you're that much of a cheap a$$ Asian, I will give you a dollar out of my F%*#ing pocket." Things then escalated as we told her she was representing Mariano's when she made that nasty racist comment, but she just laughed off. My husband decided to take a picture of her, which triggered her to become more aggressive; she chased us to the exit with more harassment and name-calling. During the entire time, multiple Mariano's employees and a security witnessed the incident, but no one decided to stop her from further harassment. The next day, I called Mariano's to report this incident. A customer service manager named Claudina took down the complaint. Later on, during a follow-up call, Claudina confirmed that we were being overcharged, and from the CCTV video she saw, Kristina aggressively harassed us, but she refused to apologize for the situation or provide a refund. This is not the first time we have noticed a price difference at Mariano's to add to the story. The last time we found out that we were overcharged, Mariano's decided to refund the difference. But we noticed they never refund the tax portion of the overcharge. We confronted the manager and corporate Kroger on this issue and were told they never refund tax, even if they were not supposed to charge that in the first place. It has been a long dishonest business practice they have been getting away with without any troubles.