Management nightmare of the week: A tie
Which is worse, having your manager arrested for allegedly planting a video camera in the women’s bathroom, or being the latest operator to discover your staff has used customers’ race as a descriptor on their tab, which of course will be presented after their meal?
Here are the particulars to decide whose employees sank farther.
The La Perla restaurant in the Miami, Fla., area was in the news because its 42-year-old manager, Hajime Maruyana, was allegedly videoing women in the restroom. A woman who took her young daughter into the facility noticed an electronic device affixed to a pipe running under the sink. She pried it off and brought it to her husband in the dining room, apparently unsure as to what it was.
Maruyana apparently saw what was going on, grabbed the cam from the family and walked away. The couple demanded that he show them what had been recorded, but nothing was accessible when the device was attached to the backroom computer. The memory chip had clearly been lifted. The husband and wife accused Maruyana of dumping it.
The police agreed and arrested Maruyana. The actual charge was that he destroyed evidence that could be used against him for a Peeping Tom charge.
Across the continent, in Austin, Texas, an IHOP waiter reportedly annotated a couple’s tab with the visual cue, “BLACK PPL,” outraging the African-American patrons he was serving. The irony: The server was himself an African-American. And apparently too dimwitted to realize that noting something innocuous about their appearance, like an article of clothing, would have been a much better way to ID the couple.