Dairy Queen Employee Fired After 'Marijuana' Cake Mix-Up Goes Viral
A “Moana”/marijuana cake mix-up that went viral earlier this week isn’t a laughing matter anymore.
On July 2, Kensli Taylor Davis shared a Facebook post with a picture of a 25th birthday cake that her mother had ordered from a Georgia Dairy Queen. The green-and-white confection featured a marijuana leaf and a stoned “My Little Pony” smoking a joint with bloodshot eyes.
It was, however, supposed to be a “Moana” cake, a movie Davis loves.
“[My mom] was telling them I love cartoons,” Davis told HuffPost earlier this week. “That’s why I wanted ‘Moana,’ and I guess they put the pony on there as my ‘cartoon.’”
Her post quickly went viral for the funny slip-up.
Davis told HuffPost that the family knew “it was a honest mistake” and “thought it was hilarious.”
But Cassandra Walker, the Dairy Queen employee who made the cannabis-themed ice cream cake told USA Today on Thursday that she had been fired over the mistake — which wasn’t even her fault.
According to Walker, who worked at the Dairy Queen for about a year, her manager was the one who misheard the order and gave the approval for the design.
“The manager stood behind me while I pulled the images off the internet,” Walker told the newspaper. “She walked by as I decorated the cake. As I boxed the cake up, she was the one who walked it up to the front.”
When the family pointed out the error, Walker said the store apologized and offered to make a new cake. But the subsequent publicity from the incident led the store to fire Walker, a mother of two, on Monday — her birthday.
When asked by USA Today about the decision, Al Autry, one of the Dairy Queen owners, didn’t address the issue. “When the customer picked it up and said it was not what she ordered, we immediately apologized for the error and offered to redesign it the way she originally intended,” he said.
“It’s not funny to me,” Walker told the paper. “This is back-to-school time. I have two little girls here. I have a car that needs fixing. It’s not funny to me.”
Walker said that by Thursday afternoon, another store manager (not the one who approved the cake design) had called to offer to reinstate her. Walker declined, however, because of how the store handled the incident, noting that she had always been an employee in good standing.
Davis did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment on the news of Walker’s firing.
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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
