The manager of an Oklahoma Starbucks where a police officer received a cup with the word “pig” scrawled on it says she was wrongfully terminated because the coffee chain “was looking for someone” to blame.
Lola Price, who worked at the Starbucks in Glenpool, said she was not the one who wrote the derogatory words on five coffees ordered by a local police officer on Thanksgiving Day, KTUL reported.
“I was terminated from my position because Starbucks was looking for someone to take the blame for this and to save some face from their company,” she told the outlet.
Price said she tried to remedy the situation with the officer before he left the cafe.
“He laughed it off, said it was cool,” Price said. “I handed him his blueberry muffin, and I went back off the floor to continue doing my shift manager duties.”
But the officer’s colleague Kiefer Police Chief Johnny O’Mara did not take too kindly to the messages.
“This is what he gets for being nice,” O’Mara wrote in a Facebook post on Thanksgiving Day. “What irks me is the absolute and total disrespect for a police officer who, instead of being home with family and enjoying a meal and a football game, is patrolling his little town.”
O’Mara’s post went viral, prompting Starbucks to part ways with the employee who wrote the insults on the cups.
“The Starbucks partner who wrote this offensive word on a cup used poor judgement and is no longer a partner after this violation of company policy,” the company said in a statement.
Starbucks made no mention of the manager’s firing in the statement.
Price said she received a call on Thursday evening from her supervisors letting her know that she was being let go.
“They, to make it seem like they were right on top of everything, which they are … they terminated me from my position with no cause,” Price told KTUL.