In a first for Los Angeles, the city hit a West Coast-based grocery store chain with a $10,000 fine after a Black customer made a discrimination claim about having to shop without his backpack while other shoppers were allowed to do so.
The fine from the city’s Civil Rights Department was announced Monday during a news conference at Los Angeles City Hall, where Corey Brown shared his experience shopping at one of Smart & Final’s locations downtown on Figueroa Street on Sept. 22, 2022, CBS Los Angeles reported.
“All I wanted to do is get groceries, but I was treated differently than other patrons at the store all because of the color of my skin,” Brown said, according to CBS Los Angeles.
Brown said he entered the store that day just as he had “hundreds of times before” when he was stopped by security.
“[I was] told by the security guard I could not enter the store unless I placed my backpack on the floor at the front of the store,” Brown said at the news conference.
Since he had mail and other personal items stored in his backpack, Brown said rather than leaving his backpack on the store’s floor, he decided to return home to drop it off before coming back to resume shopping at Smart & Final.
“A short time later, I saw other patrons – non-African-American patrons – who were permitted to keep their bags and backpacks while shopping, not asked to leave their bags or backpacks on the dirty floor at the front of the store,” Brown said.
After the incident, Brown filed a complaint with the department, and an investigation found that the store’s bag policy was discriminatory and enforced based on how customers looked, according to the news outlet.
“I worked with [an] investigator over the last year, and if it weren’t for his help, Smart & Final would continue to evade responsibility,” Brown said, according to ABC7 Los Angeles.
The grocery store chain’s security vendor was also penalized $5,000.
The fines marked the first enforcement action under the City of Los Angeles’s Civil Human Rights Law passed by its city council in 2019, LAist reported.
The law “prohibits discrimination in the private sector areas of commerce, education, employment and housing” and “allows for local enforcement … so that Angelenos wouldn’t have to wait, sometimes for years, to have a discrimination case resolved at the state or federal level,” according to the city’s civil rights department website.
“This enforcement should send a clear message to the unscrupulous actors in Los Angeles that we’re ready to come after you and make sure this city’s commerce, education, employment and housing are free of discrimination,” said Hugo Soto-Martinez, a Los Angeles city council member who chairs the council’s Committee on Civil Rights, Equity, Immigration, Aging and Disability, at Monday’s conference, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Smart & Final released a statement on Monday, saying, “We have only just received information from the city regarding these claims, which involved a former third-party security guard and not one of our employees. We take these allegations very seriously and are actively investigating the matter. Discrimination goes against our core values and has no place in our stores,” CBS Los Angeles reported.
