A car dealership in Raleigh, North Carolina issued an apology after the N-word was printed on oil change reminder stickers for customers’ cars. Leith Volkswagen has also reportedly fired a third-party cleaning crew that it blames for tampering with their label making machines after-hours.
WRAL News reports an internal investigation at Leith Volkswagen determined none of its employees were responsible for printing the slurs. Unfortunately, the discovery wasn’t made until after some of the affected cars made their way back into customers’ hands.
Conrad Alston, a Black man, was one of the 11 customers impacted by the offensive sticker after his girlfriend picked up his 2017 Volkswagen Passat from the dealer after an oil change. WRAL says it was the second car he had purchased from Leith Volkswagen.
“It makes you upset,” Alston told Aaron Thomas of WRAL News. “It makes you angry.
His girlfriend posted the incident on Facebook, and it quickly got over 715 shares on the social media site. Leith Volkseagen of Raleigh also issued a statement and apology on Facebook.
The dealership says the only people with access to the label machine during Friday evening, February 24, were the cleaning crew. The cleaning crew’s management team then did its own internal investigation and found that a teenager who came to work with them that night was the one who tampered with the label maker. As you may have imagined, the teenager was let go.
You can read the full statement from Leith Volkswagen here:
Now, Alston says he isn’t sure if he’ll bring his car back to the dealership in the future.
“I think somebody should have looked into this and seen it before it happened, seen it before any customer got treated in this manner that day,” Alston told the outlet.