Chipotle is under fire after terminating a manager who refused to serve customers she suspected of dining and dashing, and it reveals a massive problem plaguing restaurants and retailers (CMG)

• Chipotle fired a manager after a video in which she refused to serve a group of young black men went viral.
• Chipotle was criticized for firing the manager when the customer who posted the video was revealed to have tweeted in the past about dining and dashing.
• The incident reveals the difficulties restaurants and retailers face when it comes to accusations of theft, shoplifting, and dining and dashing.

Chipotle is under fire after a series of tweets with accusations of racial profiling and dining and dashing went viral.

On Friday, a Twitter user named Masud Ali tweeted a video of himself and a group of friends being refused service at a Chipotle restaurant in St. Paul, Minnesota.

“You’ve got to pay because you’ve never got money when you come in here,” an employee appears to tell Ali.

The group of young black men respond by saying that employees are stereotyping them with the assumption that they could not pay for their order. The video went viral, having been viewed more than 6.5 million times as of early Monday.

Chipotle said in a statement Friday that the manager who refused to serve Ali and his friends had been fired.

“Regarding what happened at the St. Paul restaurant, the manager thought these gentlemen were the same customers from Tuesday night who weren’t able to pay for their meal,” the statement said.

“Regardless, this is not how we treat our customers and as a result, the manager has been terminated and the restaurant is being retrained to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again.”

Over the weekend, however, many people came to the fired manager’s defense.

Critics of Chipotle’s decision found tweets of Ali’s (some of which are years old) that seemed to indicate he had a history of dining and dashing, a theft in which customers order and receive food without paying. The tweets, which Ali has since deleted, include one that says “Dine and dash is forever interesting.”

On Sunday, Chipotle said it planned to investigate further and might rehire the manager.

“Our actions were based on the facts known to us immediately after the incident, including video footage, social media posts and conversations with the customer, manager, and our employees,” a company representative said in a statement.

“We now have additional information which needs to be investigated further. We want to do the right thing, so after further investigation we will retrain and rehire if the facts warrant it.”

The viral drama reveals a common conundrum in the retail and restaurant industries: How should employees react if they suspect a customer is trying to steal something?

It is a question that gets more complicated as companies attempt to address a long history of racial profiling.

In the past year alone, countless videos showing the aftermath of apparent racial profiling at restaurants and other retail establishments have gone viral. Incidents such as the arrest of two black men in a Starbucks and three black teens being accused of shoplifting by Nordstrom workers have drawn wide attention to the issue.

Read more: People are shining a spotlight on companies’ racial discrimination after Starbucks arrests — here are 6 incidents that show how common the problem actually is

Still, the Chipotle incident illustrates another side of the problem facing businesses. Dining and dashing and shoplifting are a massive problem for the industry, with shrink — or loss of inventory related to theft, shoplifting, error, or fraud — adding up to an estimated $46.8 billion in losses across the US in 2017, according to the National Retail Federation.

While critics may blame these losses on a new era of political correctness, companies like Chipotle are actually facing a new version of an old problem.

Companies have long grappled with the fact that confronting suspected shoplifters and dine-and-dashers may create more problems than it is worth. Many employees are instructed to allow suspects to carry on uninterrupted rather than risk creating a dangerous situation or a public-relations nightmare.

“It’s so normal, it’s ridiculous,” a bra specialist who says she spots shoplifters daily at her job in a Victoria’s Secret store in South Florida recently told Business Insider’s Mary Hanbury.

“When I first got to this mall, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is crazy,’ and now I am like, ‘Oh, OK, it’s Monday,'” she said.

Retailers including Victoria’s Secret, Walmart, and Macy’s all have policies that encourage employees not to directly engage with suspected shoplifters. These policies are said to be in place to maintain employee safety as well as to prevent racial profiling of customers.

Petty theft has long been a fact of the industry. And, as in the case of Chipotle, employees interfering can lead to even more problems — especially in the era of viral videos.

SEE ALSO: Victoria’s Secret employees say they witness shoplifting almost every day but that they’ll be fired if they try to stop it

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