Shiann Friesen is raising awareness after a Walmart employee told her not to try on a sweater because she would stretch it too much.
Friesen, the 19-year-old Canadian vlogger was able to capture the incident on camera and post it to her YouTube channel, ShiCurves, where it has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. In the video, the female Walmart employee takes clothes out of Friesen’s hands and urges her not to try on something that “obviously is not going to fit.” Friesen pulls out her camera and asks the woman what she means.
“Just don’t try to push it,” she tells her.
Friesen then turned off the camera so she wouldn’t be asked to delete any footage.
“I was so shocked I had to ask her to repeat what she had said, because maybe I would hear it differently,” Friesen said in an interview with People Magazine. “And of course, I didn’t. But I quickly realized that I was being discriminated against, and I was hurt. I felt anger and vulnerability; something I never would have expected to happen to me.”
Friesen has since reached out to Walmart and they were shocked to hear her story.
“One of our core beliefs is respect for the individual, that’s certainly paramount,” said Alex Robertson, Walmart’s senior director of corporate affairs.
“Every single person from the Walmart team I talked to has been extremely sorry and extremely shocked that this even happened at one of their stores,” Friesen says.
Cosmopolitan reports that Robertson told them in an email that “management at the store where it happened has ‘discussed the matter’ with the employee.” Let’s hope Friesen’s publicizing of the incident has made the world a little more tolerant!