Best Buy Faces Discrimination Suit

Poor Best Buy. Just after their president was forced to eat crow about forced bundling of Xbox 360 accessories, they must now face down allegations of discrimination by current and former employees. They allege that women and minorities were excluded from the good jobs in a corporate culture that catered to pasty, white men.

“I was told by several managers that I didn’t need to be on the sales floor. I was told females can’t sell,” Chappel, 48, told reporters at a news conference.

When we were young and worked for Best Buy one cold holiday season, our store manager (in fact, much of the upper management) was a mix of mostly minorities and women.

(Actually, we just realized that sentence, parsed correctly, makes no sense. But we like the crazy Frankenstein Carmen Miranda picture it paints, so it stays.)

That’s not to say these allegations are unfounded, but simply that complaints at this level are usually a store- or district-level issue, not necessarily something endemic to the company as a whole.

Unless you’re talking about discrimination of women and minorities in executive positions. But come on, everybody does that.

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