Safeway review: Safeway

I had a really disturbing experience at this Safeway that made us feel racially profiled and discriminated against.

Azi and I came in looking for canned boba and didn’t know what aisle they were in, so we were walking around trying to find them. When Azi went into an aisle with a bunch of drinks, I said to Azi that the boba probably wouldn’t be there and would probably be in the Asian aisle because “they’re pretty racist here.”

The SECOND I said that, a woman working as a vendor inside the store immediately turned her head toward us and asked what we were looking for. We told her canned boba. I walked away while Azi stayed behind, and after I left, this woman actually told Azi that she was going to **watch us**.

When we eventually found the canned boba and came out of the aisle with it, she had moved from where she had originally been and positioned herself closer to us. She was standing there watching us and then asked if we had found what we were looking for.

We had done absolutely NOTHING suspicious. We weren’t concealing merchandise, opening anything, or doing anything that would suggest we were stealing. We were literally walking around trying to find canned boba.

What makes this especially disturbing is that she explicitly told Azi she was going to watch us and then actually repositioned herself to continue monitoring us. This wasn’t us simply “feeling” like someone happened to be looking at us. She verbalized her intention to watch us.

Whether she was a vendor or a Safeway employee does not change the fact that this happened while we were customers inside Safeway. Being singled out and monitored like potential thieves when we had done nothing wrong felt discriminatory, biased, humiliating, and completely unnecessary.

Customers should be able to walk into a grocery store and look for a product without being treated like criminals. Safeway needs to take discriminatory profiling seriously, including when it comes from vendors they allow to work inside their stores.