Eabametoong man offended by store’s labeling

On July 18, father of four Simon Slipperjack was at home after doing some shopping at a local Dollarama location in Thunder Bay when his common-law wife noticed something strange on the receipt.
Below the business name and address, in capital letters were the words “NATIVE SALE.”
“I looked at it, and said ‘holy smokes,” Slipperjack said. He is a member of Eabametoong First Nation and a resident of Thunder Bay.
“A typical native will take it as a joke, but after a while the more I looked it, it started to offend me,” he said of the words on the receipt. “I felt like I got labeled.”
Slipperjack questioned on what a receipt from the store would say if a Chinese person or a Caucasian person were to make a purchase.
“I got mad,” he said. “I see a lot of native people who shop there. I wonder was it a joke on the other side?”
Slipperjack took a photo of the receipt and posted it to his Facebook account. The image has been shared almost one hundred times since he posted it, and the comments range from confusion to amusement. One commenter speculated that the receipt reads “Native sale” because Slipperjack used his status card.
“Why didn’t they just put tax-exempt or status card purchase like other places?” Slipperjack questioned.
He plans on returning to the store to ask the manager about the label on his receipt.
“I hope it wasn’t intentional,” Slipperjack said. “Maybe their machines are just set up that way.”
A call was made by Wawatay News to a different Dollarama location in Thunder Bay. When questioned as to what their receipts said when a customer used a status card in a purchase, the employee who did not give a name said “we are already working on it.”
The employee suggested it was possibly the new cash registers that had been set up to label status card purchases that way.
As to why Slipperjack felt the need to share the photo with his friends and other people via social media, he said that he just wanted to keep his fellow Anishinaabe people informed as to what is going on.
“I know there’s a lot of racism out there. I myself like to be informed of it and be notified of things to watch out for,” he said.
No one could be reached for comment at Dollarama’s head office in Montreal.