Perplexing pizza receipt labels ‘gay’ customer

Jason Ulrich ordered a pepperoni pizza, salad and soda. What he got was a lesson in stereotypes.

“It’s just so bizarre,” said Ulrich (pictured opposite with a copy of the receipt) who enjoyed his dinner from Woodstock’s Pizza on Feb. 15 but the next morning noticed a curious detail on the cash register receipt: In the place where the customer’s name should have been, the computer printout read, “gay.”

“At first I just kind of laughed it off. But when I thought about it I just got angrier and angrier,” he said. “Maybe if someone who wasn’t gay saw that, they wouldn’t take it so seriously.

“It just pulled it all back into perspective how some people are prejudiced,” he said.

Ulrich, who’s 26 and works downtown, went to the pizzeria with his concerns the next day, and an employee apologized profusely, put the correct name in the computer and offered Ulrich a free pizza. But he felt the manager gave him the brush-off. “He said there was nothing he could do about it—that he didn’t know who was responsible,” Ulrich said.

Josh Read, Woodstock’s general manager, said he is taking what happened to Ulrich very seriously.

“I’ve done a lot of research on it to figure out where and how that got put in,” Read said, including calling a special employee meeting.

Read said it’s possible that the “gay” notation was a holdover from when someone else had that phone number and a former employee was goofing around. “It had not been put in recently,” he said. “It doesn’t look like it was geared toward him.”

The workers have since been told that they are never to put joke names or personal comments into the computer, even if they’re just messing with friends or other employees. They’ve signed an additional contract saying they’re aware of Woodstock’s policy against harassment or discrimination.

Ulrich said all he wanted is an acknowledgement that somewhere along the line someone at Woodstock’s did the wrong thing.

“I just want people to be aware that this kind of thing goes on and it’s just not right," he said. "It takes away everything I am and boils it down to the word gay, and that’s not everything I am."