Why Did CVS Employees Hide and Call the Cops When These Men Asked for Sliced Cheese?

Let’s kick this off with a Choose Your Own Adventure scenario. You’re a CVS employee who has just been stopped by a customer and asked whether the store carries sliced cheese. Do you A) shake your head no, but direct him to the refrigerated items anyway, B) show him a wide variety of shelf-stable snacks instead, or C) freak out and hide from him in a locked room in the back of the store?

If you selected C, you probably work at the CVS in Richmond, Virginia’s Carytown district. According to Ricky Berry, he and his roommate, Philip Blackwell, went to that particular drugstore on Thursday night to pick up a package of sliced cheese. The two of them asked an employee where to find the cheese and, after telling them that the store didn’t carry it, the evening took a turn toward the WTF.

Berry said that the CVS workers all immediately disappeared from the sales floor, leaving the two shoppers alone in the store. “We looked around for probably 30, 45 minutes and we couldn’t find anybody,” Blackwell told WATE. They stumbled into a third customer—a man looking for Orajel—but other than that, the aisles were empty.

Police officers soon arrived on the scene and were as confused as Berry and Blackwell were. “[The officer] was laughing with us because, like, this is how weird apocalyptic movies start,” Berry said.

After an officer found the employees all hiding behind a locked door, he politely told Berry and Blackwell that they had to leave. “We’re being kicked out because they were scared of us and hiding,” Berry said in a Snapchat video he filmed during his weird ordeal.

Berry and Blackwell are both black, so was this some ridiculous racism on the part of the CVS staff? Or is it another instance of CVS’s alleged racial profiling? (In the past two years, there have been two class-action lawsuits from former store detectives, accusing the pharmacy chain of instructing its employees to profile customers to prevent shoplifting). A CVS spokesperson says no, on both counts.

“CVS has firm nondiscrimination policies that are rigorously enforced throughout the company. We do not tolerate any practices that discriminate against any of our customers, and profiling of customers is explicitly prohibited,” Mike DeAngelis, CVS Senior Director of Corporate Communications told MUNCHIES. “The local news coverage in the Richmond market failed to report that both employees working in the store that evening are African-American, and there is no indication that the race of the customers played a role in this incident.”

He also emphasized that even if there was a legitimate safety concern, employees are not supposed to leave the sales floor during business hours. DeAngelis apologized for the incident and said that the District Manager of the Richmond area had reached out to Berry to apologize as well. Hopefully, one of them threw in a package or two of sliced cheese.