Goodwill Store Discriminates Against Disabled Customer with Service Dog

Goodwill Industries, as you probably know, operates a chain of thrift stores.  The income generated by those stores goes to fund numerous social service programs, many of them focused on vocational rehabilitation for people with disabilities.  

Many years ago, I worked for Goodwill briefly as a vocational rehabilitation technician.  That’s a fancy-sounding title for a job that was much less technical than it sounds.  I worked in a sheltered workshop, a place where adults with developmental disabilities and some physical disabilities came Monday through Friday to work.  They performed simple jobs, like counting out eight screws and sealing them inside little plastic packages or carefully pasting labels on the front of the little plastic packages.  Those with more skills performed more complex tasks, like counting out four screws and four bolts that went in the same package.

Clients were paid by the piece, not by the hour.  Most earned well below minimum wage.  My duties included teaching clients to perform their tasks, finding ways to help them complete the tasks (like if they could not count to eight, we gave them a wooden tray with eight slots in it and they put a screw in each slot, then put the screws into the plastic packages), keeping them on task (clients sometimes fell asleep at their work stations, or got distracted talking to each other, or simply wandered off), running over to help when one had a seizure, and filling out tedious observation forms. 

To complete the observation forms, I was required to watch a client closely for 15 minutes and write down what he was doing every 15 seconds on a chart.  I used a code: W for working, T for talking, S for sleeping, NP for nose picking, etc.  Yeah, really.  I had a code for nose picking.  The client was not supposed to know I was observing him, so I would take a seat across the room and try not to let him see me looking at him.  I was good at doing observations; I could monitor three or four clients at a time by choosing those that were sitting near each other and lining up the forms in front of me.

I know I’ve gone off on a tangent here, but my point is, I did not feel Goodwill treated their clients very well.  I did not feel they treated their employees very well, either, which is why I left that job. 

So anyway, Goodwill deals with people with disabilities all the time.  So you would think they would be familiar with the Americans with Disabilities Act and comply with it, right?  Well, you’d be wrong.

A woman with a service dog that helps her when she has seizures recently tried to go shopping at the Goodwill store in Johnson City, Tennessee.  The store manager refused to allow her to come in with her service dog.  He asked to see some sort of certification or other documentation, which is not required by law and doesn’t really even exist.  I mean, there are companies that will issue you some sort of certification for a service dog, but it’s a scam.  It’s meaningless paper.  You don’t have to be disabled to buy one and you don’t have to have a trained service dog.  You just have to have a credit card.  So this woman did not have a meaningless piece of paper saying her dog was a real service dog, so the manager refused to allow her to shop at Goodwill.

A representative for Goodwill was later asked about the manager’s behavior and said that he agreed with the manager’s actions and that people with service dogs would only be allowed in if they had “the right paperwork.”  He did not explain what “the right paperwork” would be.  Apparently, he was not impressed with the Americans with Disabilities Act.  He was more impressed with fake certificates for service dogs.

A few days after the media picked up this story, the representative from Goodwill changed his mind and said something along the lines of he still thinks some sort of documentation should be required but since federal law says business owners are not allowed to ask for documentation, Goodwill would begin complying with the law and allow service dogs without fake certificates into the store.  He said it like he was doing disabled shoppers a big favor by allowing them to shop there, not like he was doing his legal duty or just being a decent guy.

Here are some related articles:

Service Dog Owner Claims Discrimination

http://www.wcyb.com/news/31182541/detail.html

Goodwill Changes Policy on Service Dogs

http://www.wcyb.com/news/31192411/detail.html
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Unfortunately, this sort of thing happens all the time, even at places you wouldn’t expect to have problems, like at agencies that deal with the disabled on a daily basis.