A snobby — potentially racist — Swiss boutique refused to help Oprah Winfrey buy a $38,000 handbag, telling her, “You will not be able to afford that,” the billionaire media mogul said.
The talk-show host said she had been in Zurich for Tina Turner’s wedding last month when she stopped to shop at Trois Pommes.
“I say to the woman, ‘Excuse me, may I see that bag right above your head?’ And she says to me, ‘No, it’s too expensive,’ ” Winfrey told “Entertainment Tonight,” using an accent to imitate the sales clerk.
“And I say, ‘No, no, no, you see the black one?’ ”
“And she said, ‘No, no, no, you don’t want to see that one. You want to see this one because that one will cost too much. You will not be able to afford that,’ ” Oprah added, “and I said, ‘No, I really did want to see that.’ She refused to give it.”
Winfrey — who Forbes reports made $77 million in 2012-13 — said she decided not to make a scene.
“I could’ve had the whole blow-up thing and thrown down the black card, but why do that?” she said. “But that clearly is, you know . . . it [racism] still exists.”
Shop owner Trudie Goetz chalked up the incident to a language gap, telling the BBC the sales clerk is a native Italian speaker.
“I have to admit that the employee is Italian. Of course she speaks English, but not as well as her mother tongue,” Goetz said. “It was a real misunderstanding.”
On CNN, Goetz said, “Mrs. Oprah said she just wanted to look at the bag. She didn’t want it taken down. And because my sales associate felt a little embarrassed about the price, she quickly said that she also had the model in other materials such as ostrich and suede, which weren’t as expensive.”The incident drew an apology from the Swiss tourism office, with a rep saying, “We are very sorry for what happened to her.”
It wasn’t Winfrey’s first store snub. As The Post’s Page Six revealed, a Hermes boutique in Paris refused to allow her and pal Gayle King inside in 2005, saying it was “having a problem with North Africans lately.”