Over the weekend, talk show host and singer Kelly Clarkson posted online recounting an interaction at Art of Play, a boutique in Brooklyn, alleging a clerk gave her \u201cthe Pretty Woman treatment\u201d over an alleged $15,000 non-salable display item. Clarkson\u2019s post sparked a wave of public backlash and online harassment directed at the retail worker. In response, Stuart Appelbaum, President of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), issued the following statement:<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether it involves a high-profile celebrity or an everyday shopper, no customer has the right to abuse retail workers on the floor or mobilize online harassment against them. This incident isn’t about one individual; it highlights a widespread pattern of mistreatment, intimidation, and cyberbullying that retail staff face every single day.<\/p>\n
\u201cStore workers do not set store prices, manage corporate supply chains, or control inventory or sales decisions. Taking out frustration or entitlement on workers in-person or online simply doing their job is unacceptable. While legislative protections like New York\u2019s Retail Worker Safety Act establish critical safety baseline standards, we need a fundamental shift in retail culture. Every customer who walks into a store, especially those with massive platforms, has a responsibility to treat retail workers with basic human decency and respect.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the weekend, talk show host and singer Kelly Clarkson posted online recounting an interaction at Art of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":375460,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-375459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375459\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/375460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}