Chipotle has fired one of its managers after a video posted by a black customer recorded her asking his group to pay before ordering and accusing them of being serial dine-and-dashers.
“Can a group of young well established African American get a bite to eat after a long workout session?” asked Twitter user Masud Ali, who posted the clip of him and his friends at a St. Paul, Minnesota branch of the US burrito chain on Friday.
The two-minute clip starts with the manager telling the feared wannabe carbo-loaders mid-sentence: “You gotta pay because you never have money when you come in here bro.”
In response, the bewildered men repeat the woman’s claim: “we got no money?” before attempting to convince the manager that they had honest intentions. The clip has received 3.85 million views and was shared over 30,000 times.
A second clip in the post’s thread then shows the men refusing to leave the establishment until they got served while the manager proceeds to call the police.
In response to being constantly tagged by outraged Twitterati, Chipotle’s social media arm reached out to Mr Ali on Saturday. They apologized for the accusations leveled at his group by the manager and informed him that she had been fired.
“What happened here is not how our employees should treat our customers,” Chipotle said.
They added: “We are committed to treating all of our guests fairly and with respect. The manager has been terminated and the restaurant has been retrained so this doesn’t happen again.”
Following their Twitter apology, the company added that the manager had mistaken the men for another group of black diners who had failed to pay for a meal earlier in the week.
However, in another spicy twist, Chipotle’s rush to smooth the racially sensitive situation with decisive action has already faced a social media backlash of its own.
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Internet sleuths trawling Mr Ali’s profile to assess his good character have come out defending the manager’s instincts, posting screenshots of previous tweets by Mr Ali bragging about not paying for meals in restaurants.
One screenshot shows Mr Ali calling dine-and-dashing “forever interesting,” while another suggests changing what Chipotle location he attends for fear that the restaurant’s staff were “catching up on us fam.”
Chipotle said they were aware of the accusations that Mr Ali and his cohort may have been serial offenders for not paying at the chain and the situation is still being investigated.
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