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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (9740)	1/25/2006 2:55:05 PM
From: Glenn Petersen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541477

I don't think that is primarily racially motivated. Even if it is I think they should have the right to decide where to build their restaurants and I think the vast majority of people would agree with me. Preferring to build in the suburbs, or even making an effort not to build a business in "majority minority" areas is very different than telling people "you can't come in here unless you are white." I agree with you that Denny’s has a right to build its restaurants wherever it wants, though the exclusion of Chicago is curious. The city has numerous Denny’s clones, most of which appear to be thriving. I would like to think that the oversight was not racially motivated, though Denny’s behavior in what are now pre-historical days makes its decision making process during that period suspect. Randhall B. Dunham, a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Business, has written a fairly decent piece (“Denny’s and Racism”) on the legal problems that Denny’s experienced in the early 90’s. In 1993 and 1994, following the class-action lawsuits filed by the black teenagers and the Secret Service agents, thousands of complaints came in from across the country. Attorneys from the United States Justice Department concluded they were dealing with the largest case ever in the history of the public accommodations section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Thousands of people joined the six black Secret Service agents' class-action lawsuit. <snip> Eventually Flagstar conceded defeat and settled the class-action suits, consolidating one of them with a case originally settled in 1993 with the U.S. government (Rice, 1996). By December 1995, Denny's had paid out $54 million to some 295,000 customers and their lawyers (Rice, 1996). instruction.bus.wisc.edu To be charitable, I doubt that the bad behavior exhibited by certain of Denny’s employees was the result of any corporate mandate, though I do suspect that the company was remiss in communicating to its employees and managers that such behavior was inappropriate and not to be tolerated. Denny’s paid a heavy price for that bad behavior.