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A 16-year-old girl says a routine trip to the Build-A-Bear Workshop at Southcenter Mall turned into an ugly display of political bias when an employee allegedly refused to print “Charlie Kirk” on the bear’s birth certificate and crumpled it up in front of her. The teen, identified as Evi McCormick, told reporters she was stunned and walked away from the register while her friends and mother were left dealing with the aftermath.
When McCormick’s mother called corporate, Build-A-Bear first offered a modest $20 gift card and later apologized, telling the family the incident shouldn’t have happened and that staff would be retrained to avoid politicizing customer interactions. That promise of retraining is a familiar corporate script that often arrives only after conservative consumers raise a fuss, which is why many remain skeptical that anything meaningful will change.
The store’s own signage warns against “indecent or distasteful” names, but that policy is vague and gives employees broad discretion to inject their personal politics into otherwise harmless moments. When a teenager tries to honor a public figure she admired and is met with contempt rather than service, it’s not a neutral enforcement of policy — it’s ideological gatekeeping.
This incident isn’t isolated. In recent weeks video clips circulated showing employees at other national retailers refusing service over requests tied to Charlie Kirk, including a widely reported Office Depot episode that resulted in at least one termination and a Starbucks case that forced corporate clarification of its policies. These patterns illustrate how frontline workers’ personal politics, left unchecked, can quickly become de facto company policy.
Conservatives are tired of watching their views — and even mourning rituals — be treated as unacceptable in polite society while the same tolerance is extended to the left. This is about more than one teddy bear; it’s about a cultural rot where a line worker feels empowered to deny simple customer requests because of a name on a piece of paper. That kind of moral arrogance has real consequences for trust in institutions.
Build-A-Bear’s promise to retrain staff is a necessary first step, but empty apologies won’t rebuild credibility. Corporations that market to broad audiences must enforce genuine neutrality in customer-facing decisions, and they must discipline ideological discrimination consistently when it occurs — not merely spin an apology after the backlash.
At the heart of this story is a basic American expectation: businesses should serve customers, not police their political sympathies. If the next generation is to grow up believing in fair play and free expression, companies must stop allowing employees’ personal biases to turn everyday transactions into political tests. The country deserves better than a culture of quiet censorship dressed up as corporate virtue.
