Canadian Tire Gas+

I am South Asian and many times I have waited in line at the Garage area and a "white" person will be served before me. I also notice
Canadian Tire hires a disportional white people compared to other ethnic minorities unlike other retain organization. I have boycotted this place and will never shop here again. I urge other minorities to do the same as that is only way change will happen. Tell your friends, neigbours to also boycot the place.

I am describing you to inform about a sad and horrific experience encountered by me in this store on July 10, 2010, 11 / 12 O' clock. I went to the store around 11 AM to buy an umbrella and/or rain coat for my wife and son. I have a shoulder hanging bag which I use to carry my books & papers wherever I go. I am grad student in “university of western Ontario” and recently become an immigrant of Canada. Naturally I went to Canadian tire if I want to buy little bit better quality product else I shop with walmart. Today when I was almost done with choosing an umbrella (for my wife) and a child rain coat (for my son) then a young stuff of Canadian tire (14 to 18) just directly approach me and ask me to get rid of my bag. According to him (later confirmed by his manager and superior) that in Canadian tire store it is forbidden to carry bags. It was just shocking as there are lots of people around me who have even bigger bags and they don’t have any problem with them. What I notice that I am a brown/black man (South Asian) in a white store where white people were doing shopping with a same or bigger size of bags and no one bothered to ask them anything. Astonishingly his manager and the other superior support him and show me a notice related to that, then I show them people all over the store who also carrying bags then they said it’s the size of the bag. According to them women can carry big bags which reveal clear gender discrimination. Then I show them a white male who carry a big backpacks but they did not notice and continue arguing and said that people came here to stole things and remove the sticker so that there is no they can bypass the alarm. In that point it almost clear to me that I was racially profiled by them as such a kind of possible theft. It was just horrible, and then I live the store and wait outside to see how many people is really harassed. As a researcher I start my job- I start counting number of people coming inside the store, their visible ethnicity and size of the bags. My assumption was correct - there was no single check for any white women or men who carry small, medium or large size bags. To finish the research I take two specific cases with one mid aged white male carrying a backpack (already mentioned) and white couple carrying similar size shoulder bag like mine. Yap I am right they also not checked or harassed. After collecting those data for sometimes I went to the manager and showed him the data. He said did you collect the gender of the person, which was another shock to me. So I asked him that over racial profiling they also have gender discriminations but tried to ignore my points. In the mean time some other customer feel encourage and start commenting and one old man said to me – “Leave Canada and go the place where you come from” and leave hurriedly. The manager did not try to stop him or other guys who were interfering in the matters. Interestingly all of them are white people. Finally I notice that all the stuff members of Canadian tire in that store are white may this is the cause which encourage them do racial profiling and this kind of discrimination. May be your targeted customers are white people and you discourage colored people like us to go there. In that case you should make big notice in front of your stores which will minimum save us this kind of embarrassment. Later I went to walmart with the very same bag and bought those umbrellas plus some other stuff. To complete my research I talked to several walmart stuffs while buying none of them had any kind of problem with my bag. My conclusion is that in some way Canadian tire has some severer policy or management problem where racism is encouraged. I will wait for your explanation and apology else my next plan is to make a small video about the incident and post it to youtube to start a campaign against “White Canadian Tire”.