AITA for enforcing the company dress code at work to an employee who doesn’t make much money

498 points•162 comments•submitted by spockercaniel622 to r/AmItheAsshole

I’m the manager of a retail establishment. The company I work for sells some high end products and the employees are supposed to look the part, we have a fairly formal dress code.

Men and women have to wear all black, women must wear a blouse and professional pants with nice shoes (heels, flats etc but no sneakers or flip flops and shoes have to be clean and not worn out), or a black dress, blazers are allowed but not required. Men have to wear a suit and tie with professional shoes.

We tell everyone this during the interview process and the company does also allow people a grace period of one month to gather the clothes they need. You can also submit tailoring and dry-cleaning bills for reimbursement. This is pretty generous in my opinion.

One employee was hired over 3 months ago so her ‘grace period’ is up. She still comes to work out of dress code; for example today she wore black jeans (not allowed), a gray blouse (not allowed but would have been if it were black) flats (allowed), and a cardigan (not allowed, blazers only, plus it was covered in dog fur).

Today I took her into the office and told her she needed to follow the dress code. I had even printed out some photos as examples of what is acceptable, and made a list of places to get inexpensive dress clothes (Ross, thredUP, different thrift stores). I also told her that since she’s outside of dress code so often outside of her grace period, she can be let go because it’s insubordination.

She responded by crying and calling me classist and saying she can’t afford nice clothes and that it feels like discrimination because she wasn’t born into money. I honestly do feel bad for her but I also know exactly how much she makes and that she frequently makes large purchases in our store (everything we sell is a non-essential item). She later called me a bitch to another employee, in front of a customer.

So now I’m wondering if I’m an asshole. I’m just enforcing the dress code policy and it applies to everyone, im not singling her out.