Winco Foods: Hazardous to Your Children

Ironically enough, it was my son who convinced me to shop at WinCo in the first place. He knew I hated crowds and big parking lots but showed me that prices were lower than the Safeway I usually went to. Now, with hindsight, I think it's better to spend a little more and retain one's dignity and sense of what is right.

An open letter to Winco Foods CEO Steven L. Goddard...

Steven L. Goddard
CEO, Winco Foods LLC
650 N. Armstrong Pl.
Boise ID 83705-0456

Re: Incident #0079833

Dear Mr. Goddard:

I have been a Winco/Cub Foods customer for many years as I enjoyed the prices, selection and what I have apparently in error considered to be friendly, courteous staff despite the somewhat cumbersome nature of shopping at such a large facility. However, a troubling incident involving my son and a security employee and events afterward have disabused me of that perception.

It was with no small degree of astonishment yesterday that I received a letter from your security department. I say astonishment because I personally find it shocking that your employee, a person apparently much larger than my son, saw fit to assault him in order to retrieve $4.53 worth of candy and in the process caused injuries that necessitated transport to the emergency room and medical bills no doubt adding up to thousands of dollars.

While I do not condone my son's actions, he is legally still a child, while one assumes that your employee is an adult and presumably trained to defuse rather than escalate such situations. Perhaps it is Winco policy to consider any action justified, despite how completely irrational, illogical, overzealous and harmful that action might be to others. Your employees are perhaps not fully informed of all the Washington statues, particularly RCW 9A.36.011, which states in part:

Assault in the first degree.

(1)A person is guilty of assault in the first degree if he or she, with intent to inflict great bodily harm:
(c) Assaults another and inflicts great bodily harm.
(2) Assault in the first degree is a class A felony.

Problematic as it seems that your employees feel justified in sending a 130-pound boy to the emergency room, even more so is the obvious scurrying by store management and security personnel to disguise the nature of the event. Particularly galling is the fact that in the letter I received from your headquarters in Boise you demand not only payment for the candy, which my son neither consumed nor left the premises with, but also an additional charge of $150.

To quite literally add insult to injury, when I visited the store on 13 September to request a copy of the security report of the incident, the store manager rather mendaciously stated that no such report had been filed. Since your letter to me cites a number for a report obviously it does exist. I then asked to view whatever video had been captured of the event and was again told that no such video existed. Conversations with local police in the meantime have put the lie to that statement as well.

In summary, I would like a copy of the report that was filed and the contact information for your liability insurance carrier. As for the charge of $154.53, you are welcome to deduct that from the payment you make to me to cover my son's torn clothing, ambulance, emergency, hospital admission and ongoing treatment by an orthopedic surgeon. I have not ruled out the possibility of a civil remedy and until I am satisfied by your efforts to redress this situation I will not hesitate to use whatever means necessary to make others aware of the inherent danger and hazard that Winco poses to children. As I am fully conversant in Web 2.0 networking technologies, this will be a simple thing to accomplish.

Until yesterday I spent in any given month several hundred dollars at Winco. In the future I am happy to instead spend those dollars with retailers such as Safeway, Grocery Outlet, Fred Meyer, Gateway Produce and the like.



Very truly yours,