Texas bar finds out the hard way that domestic violence is no joke
An employee at Austin, Texas’ Minibar found out that domestic violence is no laughing matter after a major mishap with a domestic beer promotion. The employee not-so-cleverly put out a sign promoting domestic beer that said “I like my beer like I like my violence: domestic.” 
How anyone could look at this, and think it is a good idea to put up outside of a business in order to try and get customers to come in is beyond me, but it happened. A local snapped a photo of the sign and posted it to Facebook, where the image spread and quickly gained national attention.
In typical reputation crisis fashion, the bar removed the sign and immediately fired the offending employee. “Minibar doesn’t condone that sign,” owner Alex Elmiger said. “I give my utmost apology and assure it won’t happen again. As soon as it was brought to my attention, I wanted to do something to rectify the situation.”
In their defense, Minibar has taken it upon themselves to donate $1 from every domestic beer sale to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence throughout October, in honor of domestic violence recognition month.
This is a great way to show that the establishment as a whole does not agree with one employee’s actions. However, this could have likely been prevented with a bit of upfront training. [highlight color=”yellow”]There seems to be a huge trend in our current culture to point a finger and eliminate the offender the minute something controversial happens[/highlight]. Why not invest in employees, and take the time to teach them the values of a business, in order to stop incidents like this before they even happen? Have we stopped valuing proper training in business? I worked several restaurant jobs in both high school and college, and I do remember the training time being very brief. [highlight color=”yellow”]Could restaurants and other service industry employers benefit in the long term from taking a little extra time to ensure that their employees are accurately reflecting the company’s values?[/highlight]
The bar has not even been in business for two months, there are bound to be some growing pains. All in all, their reaction to the issue was handled well – quickly and with a bit of humility. What is unfortunate is that it happened in the first place.
