When you’re searching on Yelp, you can find places by location, price, or type of food, among other specifics. Now, in the age of religious freedom and bathroom bills, you can see if a business has pledged to welcome all guests.
Through Yelp’s new Open to All Campaign, businesses can sign up and pledge to “maintain a welcoming and safe environment for people—including employees, visitors, customers, vendors and clients—regardless of race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, religion or disability,” and “not discriminate against any individuals or deny them goods or services based on any of these characteristics, and to provide all goods and services to everyone on the same terms.”
When businesses sign the pledge, users will be able to find them when they search in Yelp for “Open to All.”
According to a Yelp blog post, this campaign was launched as a response to the recent ruling Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission Case.
“Every day, consumers face varied degrees of discrimination,” Luther Lowe, Senior Vice President of Public Policy, wrote. “Beyond the LGBTQ+ community, this also, unfortunately, exists for many minority communities in our country and we are equipping consumers with the information they need to confidently patronize any place of business.”
Some other examples that Open to All gives are a Muslim woman ordered to leave a café, people with disabilities harassed at restaurants, people of color facing violence in a diner and a gay couple kicked out of an Uber.
So far, more than 1,200 businesses have pledged to the cause including Levi Strauss, Airbnb, Lyft, and Thumbtack.
