A Black woman says she was given a hard time at a Tulsa, Oklahoma CVS by a pharmacist who allegedly called the police on her because she didn’t like the woman’s tone.
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On Monday, Kendriana Washington took to Twitter to outline her experience picking up some much-needed medicine for a chronic condition. She told her followers that she received push back and “poor customer service” while trying to pickup her prescription.
In a Twitter thread displaying videos from the encounter, Washington said she tried to pay for her meds with money and a coupon, The Daily Mail reports, but the pharmacy technician, she said, told her that she would need to wait for the prescription to get filled first before making any changes to the coupon.
Washington said she did just that and when she pulled up to a drive-thru window to pick up the prescription, her bank card declined.
Washington said she asked the store worker to try to process the payment again citing that she had just used it in a grocery store and said “I know the money is on there.”
The worker tried to swipe the card a few more times but still the payment failed. Washington then said she asked Debbie to try another register to which she responded: “No. You don’t have enough money on your account. That’s usually what that means.”
Another rep named Tanya, she said, then told her: “I don’t like your tone. You need to change your tone.”
Washington then shot back: “You can’t tone police me. Just do your job, get my prescription so that I can leave.”
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That’s when Washington said Tanya threatened to call the police. Washington then decided to record the interaction on her cell phone.
“This woman is calling the police on me when I have cash and I’ve asked her several times to process my payment,” Washington says in the video.
“She’s calling the police because she doesn’t like the tone of my voice. They messed up my prescription three times.”
While on the phone with a 911 operator, Tanya says Washington was “yelling at the top of her voice.” Washington disagrees and says she simply had a “stern tone.”
As Tanya and Washington continue to quarrel, Debbie steps in and completes Washington’s transaction after all.
“This just blows my mind. After Tanya walked away, Debbie who called Tanya up in the first place then calmly walks toward me and processes my prescription,” Washington recalled.
“All of this calling the police like there was a threat, like I did something illegal, like I was being belligerent, using profanity even though I did have the right to be upset…if that was the case she [Debbie] wouldn’t have felt safe to come up to me and process my transaction anyway,” Washington said.
Washington continued: “That let me know that basically she was using the police as a punitive reaction, punishment toward me for requiring them to do their job, for refusing to have a conversation with them that they wanted them to have, for telling Debbie that she was racist which she found offensive and that’s clear afterwards when she continued to talk to me about it and told me that she couldn’t be racist because she has black friends.”
Washington said she spoke to the CVS district leader, Amanda Dixon, who she believes was advocating for Debbie and “trying to save Debbie’s job.”
“When I was telling her about what Debbie did, she kept trying to make excuses for her and sort of put more of the blame on Tanya. She said explicitly, ‘I’m not happy with what Tanya did. That was obviously a problem.”
“She wanted me to get dragged out of the store. STOP CALLING THE POLICE ON BLACK PEOPLE. I wasn’t a threat, I didn’t break the law,” Washington said.
In an interview with the DailyMail.com, she added: “There needs to be infrastructural change. There needs to be real consequences. Those people need to be terminated.”
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