The reaction of a Black customer to a conversation between another customer and two employees that many believed mocked Juneteenth has left the North Carolina body shop where it occurred scrambling to minimize the damage.
Synergy Auto Care owner Josh Dougherty said the two store employees shown in the video have left the Wilson, N.C., store after receiving death threats. A torrent of one-star reviews has caused its Google rating to plummet. Business is down.
The controversy started with a question from a customer about why banks were closed on Thursday.
An employee responded, “Juneteenth, a new holiday they started a few years ago.”
The customer replied, with a sarcastic tone, “Okey dokey.” “I know, right,” added another employee, chuckling.
The only Black person in the room, a woman, responded by demanding that the store give her the keys to the truck.
“I don’t want nothing done from here,” she said. “Please go get my truck, thank you.”
Her calm but forceful response was applauded across the Internet. The store’s reaction just made things worse.
Despite the unidentified Black woman’s offense at the conversation, no apology was offered from the store management. Instead, they went after her on Facebook, calling it today’s “WOW moment.” One of the employees repeated the story accurately, but felt no offense should’ve been taken.
The woman, who had been a customer at the store in the past, the owner said, warned she was going public for what she believed was a racist incident and was told by an employee they would post the closed-circuit footage to defend their reputation. The reaction was swift and furious.
“It was overflowed and flooded. It was just nothing but hate, so yes, I took the post down immediately, unshared it from social media and shut the page down,” Dougherty said.
No one was fired for the incident, Doughtery said. He explained the female employee involved in the conversation did not understand the full context and history of Juneteenth.
Juneteenth, which became a federal holiday in 2021, commemorates the day Union Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced that the Civil War had ended and enslaved people in Texas were free, enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863.
“She was thinking the holiday had a whole other meaning,” Dougherty said. “She was believing it had to something with school letting out, teenagers, where the ‘teenth’ came from, and she was believing it didn’t need to be a day, a serious day per se.”
Dougherty says he’s taken steps to educate the employee and the rest of his staff about potentially sensitive holidays.
“She doesn’t really have a platform to say how much she apologizes for it,” Dougherty said. “She tells me every day she wishes it didn’t go down that way. She didn’t know. She wishes she would’ve known what she knows now.”
Synergy is left to rebuild its reputation amid a flood of bad publicity. A flood of bad reviews on Google has dropped the store’s rating to 3.4.
“As an African American customer, I also didn’t feel welcomed at all,” wrote one woman. “The atmosphere was cold and dismissive, and it was clear that respect and professionalism weren’t a priority here. I expected a much higher level of customer service and basic decency.”
Others weren’t buying the store’s excuse of ignorance.
“You guys have phones you guys were on the computer. It takes two seconds to Google the importance of Juneteenth,” wrote another. “You guys would rather lose business, then keep your racism and prejudice under wraps. Is very obvious who you voted for and I hope your business tanks.”
The reaction has shown, in the words of one man, posting on X, “the power of Black folk coming together, go look at the reviews for Synergy Auto Care in Wilson, N.C.”
