“I saw two men holding hands…”: Japanese store has perfect response to prejudiced complaint

In the interest of improving customer service, it's still common in many parts of the world for stores to have physical suggestion boxes. In Japan, the suggestions and the stores' responses are sometimes posted on a wall or a board near the box for customers to read.

At one such store in Japan, an employee was surprised one day when he saw one of the printed responses that were meant to go up that day.

A prejudiced customer complaint

The customer wrote the following:

"I have been coming to this store a lot lately to do my shopping. The prices are cheap, there's a great selection, so I think it's great.
However, I saw something disturbing when I came here yesterday.

When I came to the store yesterday, I saw two men holding hands as they came out of their car on the first-floor parking lot.
Are those what you call homosexuals? Apparently, there are more and more of them these days, but it's still disturbing to see.

Don't you think you should take measures to prevent such people from entering your store? Why don't those kinds of people just meet secretly at home or somewhere? That's what I think.
If you don't do something about this, I won't come back. I'll also put it on the internet so people know what kind of store this is."

Of all things, this customer was complaining about two people who happened to be gay, two people who weren't even employees but customers who were minding their business had come to shop just like they were.

If that weren't bad enough, this customer even threatened the store.

An exemplary response

In response to this extremely unreasonable and discriminatory complaint, the company's headquarters wrote:

Reproduced with permission from the employee, who prefers to remain anonymous

"We'll get straight to the point: Please don't bother coming back.

At our company, we treat everyone as a customer, regardless of whether they are gay or heterosexual. Not one of us thinks that "the customer is God."

Everyone is a valued customer. Those who insult our customers are not welcome in our stores as customers themselves. Therefore, please do not visit us again.

We also have many LGBT people working for us, and we have never received a single comment from someone saying "It's disturbing" or "Fire them."

While we don't intend to deny your way of thinking or feeling, please do not say or do anything that directly tramples on LGBT people's way of life. That is all we ask."

This company didn't give in to this unreasonable complaint, they clearly spoke out against discrimination, and demonstrated that they truly care about their employees as well. It's a truly wonderful response, both from the person who wrote it and from the company headquarters.

The employee told us he was glad to work for such a company. We applaud him for such a sentiment as well as his company for being a good role model!

By - grape Japan editorial staff.