California woman says a Subway restaurant worker was a flat-out bully when he wrote a tasteless fat jab on her flatbread pizza order, reducing her to tears.
She now plans to file a lawsuit demanding that sensitivity training be a part of the chain's franchise agreements, she and her lawyer told the Daily News Friday.
Allison Brown said she was mortified when she pulled her order out of her bag on March 27 and saw the words "Big Mama" scrawled on her box in black marker.
"I just broke down crying. I couldn't eat it. I kept thinking, 'Big Mama' doesn't need to eat. It started really messing with me. I started thinking, 'Maybe I need surgery. Do I really look that bad? What's wrong with me?'"
Brown, a 45-year-old nursing assistant from Murrieta, Calif., said she immediately contacted the shop's owner and was told the employee admitted writing the cruel remark, but countered that he only wrote it on one of her boxes, not all the items in her family's order.
"The owner said the employee didn't know better, that he just didn't get it," Brown told The News. "He begged me not to go to the media, so I tried to work with him, but then nobody was calling me back. It's not right. This really hurt me."Brown said she called Subway's corporate office the next day and cried through a message that was never returned. She felt the issue was getting swept under the mat, she said.
Eventually she had a lawyer send a letter demanding sensitivity training, not money. She turned down an offer of $5,000 for a confidentiality agreement and now plans to file a lawsuit under California's unfair business practices law, her lawyer Daniel Gilleon told The News.
"This isn't about money," she said Friday. "This breaks my heart. Here Subway promotes itself as a place for people who need help eating better, then this happens. What if the wrong person got a box like mine? What if they saw that and tried to commit suicide?"
Gilleon said a letter sent by Subway's corporate office this week refused to take any responsibility for the issue. He now plans to file the lawsuit in the next few weeks, he said.
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Big Mama.
I'm dead.