Blair County restaurant faces backlash over racial slurs printed on receipts

Blair County, Pennsylvania (WTAJ) — A restaurant in Blair County is facing backlash after it printed racial slurs on receipts and handed them to customers.

Customer Kathy ordered a blackened chicken panini at Duncansville’s Aviation Inn, and the bar went silent as she walked in to pick it up. As a woman of color, Kathy said she was sadly used to this treatment.

“People kind of see that you’re in the minority instead of the majority,” Cassie said.

But what Kathy didn’t expect was to see the receipt and confirm the N word. After calling her restaurant, Kathy claimed one of the owners, Allen Butterbaugh, told her the slander was deliberately used as a joke and shouldn’t have been seen.

“He told me it was a joke in the kitchen and it got out of hand.”

– Cassie

Kathy said the owner had told the employee not to put it on the receipt, but the employee said he was not racist and said he was a “brother”. He said he tried to justify hanging out with minorities because of it.

Unwilling to cover up the matter, Kathy reluctantly shared her story on Facebook.

“I was scared of the backlash. I was thinking about establishing it too. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I didn’t want this to get out of hand. I was scared myself,” Cassie told WTAJ. Told.

Kathy said she received messages of support, but also messages telling her to be careful.

When asked if she would return to Aviation Inn, Kathy said no, but wanted to leave them with a word of advice.

Aviation Inn owners said of the incident that the implications were neither funny nor acceptable and that they would not tolerate attempts at bad humor.

“I was stunned. I was completely shocked. My first thought was, this is crazy. This is absolutely not good. This is terrible,” Allen said.

The slur on the receipt was intentionally entered manually, Allen explained, and this area was for order changes and was printed in red instead of black.

But the owners said they weren’t grateful that they were in the negative light since the incident.

“You can tell people instead of sharing it. Just talk to them and say, did you see what happened? Not,” said owner Maureen Butterbow.

“We’re getting backlash, we’re getting calls and threats. We get a lot of messages coming out via Facebook. It’s borderline harassment,” Allen added.

This all came after Aviation Inn issued an official apology, but NAACP President Andre Holsey said he didn’t think it was good enough, calling the incident “horrifying”.

“I heard through word of mouth that the employee was not fired until the WTAJ called, which is interesting. I think the apology could have been more thorough. It’s not enough to say,” Holsey said.

Holsey went on to say that actions speak louder than words and that this was not a singular accident, simply a banknote slipping into the bag.

Holsey calls for the community to be uplifted despite the low number of incidents.

“The purpose of all this is not to sink an individual’s life. We want them to understand that what they did was wrong, but we also want to build them to keep doing things right in the future.”

NAACP President Andre Holsey

Holsey said the NAACP will conduct an investigation into the incident to help move everyone forward. He said he would like to speak with the restaurant owners and try to prevent a recurrence.

When asked what changes would be made in the future, Maureen said she didn’t feel the need to be told not to do so.

“We have hired so many people in the past and nothing like this has ever happened before so I think we can look into it. We never thought it would happen, we’ve always been inclusive of everyone,” added Maureen.