I’m going to boycott the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, and you should too.
To make a long story short, the store refused to let a five-year-old girl who was having a bathroom emergency use their restroom. Needless to say, the little girl defecated all over herself and her parent, at which point they finally ran to a movie theater that let them clean themselves up.
If the store manager hadn’t mocked the humiliated family afterward, there might not have been a story. But the manager did decide that it would be a wonderful idea to further agitate them, and so now it’s been picked up by The Consumerist, which has additionally pointed out that as a matter of fact, there’s a rule in California called the Uniform Plumbing Code that requires a “toilet facility for customers, patrons, and visitors of all mercantile and business establishments.”
And with this embarrassingly heartless breach of both California regulations and just the simple Golden Rule itself making it onto the front page of Digg as well… Rut-roh for the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory!
Score one for the karma police.
Update: I can’t stand people that counter legal citations with, “Well, you’re not a lawyer, so you should just shut up!” Well, I found somebody that did that, and then went on to insinuate that anybody sympathizing with the little girl is just an anti-business radical. Here is what they said.
Is any one hear a lawyer in California who specializes in these type of cases? Does anyone know exactly what this establishment was zoned as, or what it technically is operating as? I think the the answer is no. Quit trying to act smart by pulling laws and facts out of our ass when you are neither fully briefed nor fully trained to handle the situation. Get off your soap box and stop wasting our time.
As for the whole “human compassion” argument, what if that girl shit herself in the food prep area, in it contaminated the food? What then? Or what if she had some sort of virus that got on the food and made people sick? Is that mother going to cover the store for their losses? No, she isn’t. This is a complex situation which can’t be simplified because you think big bad corporate America is wrong.
Brilliant in countless ways, no? Anyway, I couldn’t help but respond. Admittedly I was a little bit snarky, but that’s just my sense of humor for you. And it’s a Digg comment anyway, not a grand treatise. Just enjoy it.
Heaven forbid regular people be able to use the internet to look up laws and make sure that corporations are not ignoring them! How pretentious! Who do these people think they are, living in a democratic nation with a “by the people, for the people” attitude toward government? Stupid empowered citizens and their anti-American penchant for citing things like laws!
But seriously, if lawyers were the only ones meant to be able to understand the rules we all have to live by, then we’d be in a pretty bad situation, don’t you think? “You have to have a restroom for people to use” is a particularly easy to grasp regulation in my opinion.
If they want to do business in California, they have to play by California’s rules, and they clearly did not comply with the Uniform Plumbing Act, which quite plainly states that they need to provide restrooms to customers, patrons, and visitors. The opus is on them to make sure that they are complying with all applicable business regulations. Oops.
Now, of course I agree that it would be a bad idea to just let people wander around where the food is prepared, but that’s why you don’t put the restroom that you are obligated to provide for people in the middle of the kitchen.
This is not a complex issue at all. This is a case where an entire store did not go by the golden rule of treating others as they’d wish to be treated, resulting in some pretty gross humiliation of a little girl, which in turn is resulting in the company being exposed for not being in compliance with the law.
Sorry, but I seem to still somehow find myself feeling much more sympathetic toward the little girl that was pointlessly humiliated than I do toward the heartless, law-breaking corporate entity that humiliated her.
