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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
Still, though, refusing to show someone merchandise because it's "too expensive for you" sounds like a pretty flimsy/racist-in-disguise reason.
Two questions: (a) Who is "Whoppi"? And (b) Can't Tina get married if she wants to? Surely you're not one of those marriage-is-for-procreation-and-procreation-only people...
It's so embarrassing when your racism gets in the way of selling obscenely expensive stuff. You'd think this idiots would at least have photos of famous black people so they don't get caught in such humiliating scenarios. But we live in a post-racial world, right?
Oprah should have made the clerk ring up the bag with it still on the shelf, then having taken possession and examined it, returned it for a refund before leaving the register.
Sometimes it is good for a bigot to act like a bigot.
"I mean the sexism thing is huge. The higher the ladder you climb it gets huge, because men are used to running things."
I've long thought that sexism is more of an issue high up on the "ladder" (I have a weird job that has me spending a lot of time with large company Boards of Directors). So, it's really interesting to hear her say that...
Charles, when Tina Turner gets married? None of your business.
@8 Yep, this. A friend of mine married a guy from Zurich, started spending a lot of time there, and became unrecognizable.
@9 That is exactly what Oprah should have done.
I should point out, though, that the exact same thing happened to my wife and her group of friends (all white) one time at a jewelry store.
Also, I don't usually advocate for people to lose their jobs, but that stoopid racist Swiss shop clerk needs to go. Period.
I know it's shocking, but there's a whole strata of goods and services in the world that plebes like us will probably never encounter. A basic Birkin bag from Hermes starts at around $15,000, and those things are hanging off the arms of every other rich chickita in LA.
So yeah, if Oprah wants a nice new purse, she's not going to hop on over to Ross........
@6 Awesome.
@12, 15, 17, 24, 34 Uptight Seattlites, you are parodies of yourselves. Keep talking, dipshits. That's why the rest of the world finds you insufferable.
Even if Oprah wasn't Oprah, this store clerk was being a first class piece of shit. Barring extreme examples, you can't tell who is wealthy just by looking at them. People think they can, but they're wrong.
2) Oprah could be jumping to conclusions. She might have asked the woman why she thought Oprah couldn't afford such a bag. If this were an urban legend, of course, she's buy the boutique for the sole purpose of firing that employee.
3) Your attitude towards marriage is positively Catholic. You should convert. Luckily for those who have thrown off such mental slavery, marriage, love, affection can be about anything we damn well want it to be.
Do you not remember all those ads talking about old people during the R-74-protect civil union days??
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_…
Is it different for men and women?
At what age do you feel single people should not be getting married?
Does gender have anything to do with this age?
This bag is atrociously expensive and not something that you, Oprah, would want to have tarnishing your image as a respectful do-gooder manager of enormous wealth.
Would you want your schools' children to see such an obscenity on your person?
I mean honestly, what a shriveled cinder of heart you must have to shit on some one's joy like that.
She told that story to illustrate a point about racism and how even some one at her level of fame and fortune is judged by the color of her skin.
She happens to have more money than god, and she does an awful lot of good with it. But! Some people, who wouldn't dream of making assumptions as to how Oprah should live her life based on her race, are happy to tell her how she gets to spend her money.
Fuck that.
Tina wants to get married?
Tina should get married.
Oprah wants that handbag?
Oprah should have the handbag.
But I have to say, raku's suggestion that she purchase an organic cotton (or hemp was it?) tote bag with a screen print of a turnip on it instead? Made me laugh and laugh. :)
Let's be real. Newstands in Switzerland don't offer copies of Oprah's Magazine. In the US, Oprah is so well-known she's compared to God. Oustide of the US and I guess English speaking countries, nobody has ever heard of her in Europe. She's a talk-show host ! English-speaking talk shows are not broadcast in non-English speaking countries. Whoopie Goldberg has way more worldwide fame than Oprah.
Charles is trolling you.
In Europe, Switzerland is famed for being very very rich, very tidy, very pretty, pretty misogynistic and unapolegetically racist. Women were not allowed to vote until 1990 in some of the German-speaking parts of the country - Zurich is the capital of the German-speaking part.
In 2007, UN protested after a poster from a main-stream party, known as UDC in French (Center Union Party) and SVP in German (Swiss People's Party), depicted "three white sheep standing on the Swiss flag as one of them kicks a single black sheep away" with the legend "to create security". The New York Times reported about it, and you can see this offending poster there. There are other posters of the same water in the streets.
Right now, summer 2013, Switzerland is again making the news in Europe because of its just having allowing some towns (in the German-speaking part of the country) to build asylum seekers' hosting centers.
These are buildings were asylum seekers are required to live. Once inside the center, asylum seekers have a 9 am - 5 pm curfew to go, but not close to public places where children go - schools, swimming pools, sport equipement. That curfew can be revoked at will by the center manager, effectively holding asylum seekers prisonners. Check Human Rights Watch. In all interviews I've read, the motivation for that segregation was given as : "we must protect our kids". Some asylum seekers are kids, but they are segregated away all the same.
It's not surprising that the store's owner is keeping the salesperson and claiming a misunderstanding. Switzerland and Austria are indeed the most racist places in all of Europe. Rich non-white people are welcomed to visit there, but not to stay.
Swiss shop. Swiss price. Swiss, Swiss, Swiss...
This is a rich person thing, not an idiosyncrasy of Americans.
@59 "Well I would not be worthy of that money."
It is an odd notion that wealth would be correlated with worth; even more so that it would be a positive relationship.
I certainly don't see why it's necessarily tied to class, or even to optimism.
@39 - Confluence, don't you have a big steaming bowl of shit you can go somewhere and chow down on (see how non-academic that is of me? I even ended that sentence with a preposition [though I sort of padded it with a paranthetical])? The humans are trying to have a conversation.
I was with you, Charles, until I read that last question. Why is being 73 a bar to Ms. Turner getting married?
Being nasty on Slog may be the only thing between Confluence and ending up head down in an oven.
I was reading Casanova's memoirs a fortnight ago, and he was pretty inventive when it came to punish people (well, males) who had wronged him. I was thinking of what he would have done on such an occasion. I think it would have gone to blows, either right away, or some days later, late at night in an obscure alley, if the offender had been of superior wealth or a nobleman. He wrote about such an vengeful encounter that "if it didn't kill him it was none of my fault".
I know someone who's been on the receiving end of a racist comment in his youth and who answered back something like "right... do you know we're both alone here, that there are metal bars other there and that I could kill you and nobody would hear ?". Less of a hothead than Casanova - who took pains to always follow through on his threatening - but not as delicate as your answer.
I think the compliant is about being discriminated against, not that she wasn't shown the purse.
Actually, that makes me feel less than stellar about what I posted. It's an article of faith for me that even the worst of us has some capacity to become ... better, and I only diminish myself when I respond to someone according to what he's feeding me as opposed to what I should allow myself to imagine he could become.
Oh, well. Goes to show that I have some distance to travel between my current character and my potential character.
Still, he's (I'm assuming he's a he; I could be wrong, but something about his flavor of puffery feels distinctly masculine) frustrating in precisely the same way Seattleblues is--that is, he posts to be contrary, without actually making arguments or engaging in conversation. But at least with SB, there's some ideological clarity and consistency driving it; with Confluence, it feels more like he just wants to be disagreeable for its own sake.
@71 I don't read Confluence, but don't be too sorry for him/maybe her. I know for a fact that some people enjoy themselves immensely in being nasty to others, and positively gloat when they've succeeded in driving others into despair. Those people are not themselves the least the suicidal kind.