Disabled shoppers vs. Parkson Department Store

Oriental Guardian
October 21, 2009

Today’s Oriental Guardian features a photo of pole dancers in Buenos Aires in the center of the front page, but a more interesting story is related to a smaller photo in the left-hand sidebar under the headline “No entry? Protest!”

The Fuxingmen Parkson department store in Beijing was host to a piece of performance art yesterday morning. Two cardboard cutouts of blind people, two empty wheelchairs, and a few shoes were arranged outside the entrance to protest an incident at a Parkson store in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province in which an elderly woman in a wheelchair was refused entry.

Jiangxi’s New Legal Report has been following the case very closely. On October 13, the paper told the story of Ms. Zhang and her wheelchair-bound mother, who were barred from the store on October 8:

Ms. Zhang was an ordinary consumer like any other, but the story of why she was refused entry into Parkson begins with her 80-year-old mother. At the tail-end of the National Day holiday, Ms. Zhang planned to go to the shopping center with her mother to buy some necessities. Her mother’s advanced age made her dependent on a wheelchair, and this trip was no exception. Ms. Zhang pushed the wheelchair up to the Parksons door. “I’m sorry, you cannot come in,” a guard said politely as he barred their way. “The shopping center rules say that disabled people in wheelchairs may not enter. If you come in, we’ll be fined.” Seeing Ms. Zhang’s disbelief, the guard had them look at the “ban” stickers affixed to the glass door. Ms. Zhang remembers that they included pets and smoking, and also a wheelchair.

[…]

The Parkson security guard had a more comprehensive interpretation of the “ban”: “It’s not just disabled people in wheelchairs. Blind people can’t come in either. Look at this head symbol. It means blind people.” As he spoke, the guard pointed to the “prohibited” signs stuck on the door. He said that Parkson differed from other department stores in that it had escalators, and since wheelchairs could go neither up nor down, they would be better off not coming in at all. Could a wheelchair-bound customer look around the first floor if accompanied by a guardian? The guard shook his head.

He said, “There are lots of glass doors and walls in the store. What if blind people were always running into them?” In contrast to the guard’s explanation, Xu Lin of Parkson’s sales department said that the store refused entry to the blind and wheelchair-bound out of concern for customer safety. “A little while ago a kid fell down on the escalator, and even though he had a guardian with him, the store was ultimately held responsible. Even if a disabled person had a guardian, it’s still not safe for them.”

The newspaper released more details in a follow-up story the next day:

Ms. Zhang told this reporter that after the incident, Parkson’s customer service center had contacted her to explain that the “ban” was all a misunderstanding: the store did not prohibit the disabled from entering, so it must have been a problem with the guard. Ms. Zhang laughed bitterly and said that if that were the case, why would the store have put the symbol of a wheelchair and a blind person in the same spot as the ban stickers? And why did the guard block her so insistently and say that he’d be fined if he let a wheelchair in? Ms. Zhang said that she chose to go public to force Parkson to kill its absurd ban. If the store refused to lift the ban, she did not rule out taking it to court. Before press time, this reporter took a trip back to Parkson, where the stickers remained unchanged.

Performance art in Beijing

On the 19th, the newspaper reported that the symbols had been changed: droplets had been added to the “blind person” to turn it into a “no spitting” sign:

Zhang Jun, general manager of Nanchang Parkson, acknowledged in an interview that the “blind people prohibited” sign had been changed following news reports of the incident, but he blamed mistakes and sloppiness for the interpretation of the symbols’ intent. According to him, the “blind people prohibited” signs at the store’s three entrances were actually “no spitting” signs whose droplets had peeled off due to age. But out of the many stickers at the three entrances, why was it that only the droplets on the “no spitting” signs had peeled off? Zhang answered this question with a smile, “They got old.”

[…]

As for the “ban” mentioned in the report, Zhang said that the wheelchair sign was actually intended to allow wheelchair access. Whoever had put it up had been too careless and had not considered that it would be interpreted as belonging to the list of prohibitions.