Sometimes marriage and business don’t mix.
No one knows this better than the owner of popular local coffee chain Ritual Coffee Roasters, Eileen Rinaldi, who fired her husband last week after using a racial slur against a Black man in the parking lot of Ritual’s warehouse in San Francisco.
The incident comes nearly a year after multiple staff members at more than one location raised concerns about his behavior towards customers of color and staff themselves.
In an emailed statement to KCBS Radio, Eileen Rinaldi said that her husband, well-known San Francisco character John "Chicken John" Rinaldi, was overseeing a freelance construction project when he engaged in a verbal altercation over a parking space with a man.
According to Eileen Rinaldi, the man called her husband a racial epithet, after which, "John said he then made the horrible mistake of repeating the racial slur back to the individual, something that he never should have done."
She added that the incident was extremely upsetting to her.
"Words have power – and the word he repeated is undoubtedly racist and harmful," she said.
Chicken John worked at the coffee chain on a sporadic basis, helping out and doing construction work at various locations. His presence often ruffled feathers, according to previous reporting done by Mission Local.
Last year, he came under scrutiny after tackling and screaming at a homeless Black man who tried to take a few dollars from the tip jar at the Hayes Valley location. Staff at that location voiced their concerns about his presence in the workplace and how the incident troubled them, but he continued to work for the chain.
That wasn’t the only incident that caused staff to complain last summer.
The chain came under fire again for a former manager calling the police on a customer of color at the Valencia St. location.
These incidents, combined with staff campaigns, pushed Eileen Rinaldi to enact several changes in the last year. One such example is a six-hour de-escalation and conflict resolution workshop that all employees have to take, which she said has been designed for Ritual through the lens of "diversity, equity and inclusion," and will be integrated into its training program for on-boarding new employees.
In an email exchange with KCBS Radio, Eileen Rinaldi said she is proud of her employees and is committed to evolving.
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