Anti-masked people put shops, businesses on the edge

Lily Damtew had decided to permanently close her Ethiopian cafeteria after a man without a mask spat at her feet and threw chicken and rice at her window when she asked him to cover his face. How could she make coffee and cut quiche, she thought, afraid he would return with a vengeance?

But on Saturday, just before 7:30 in the morning, six days after the incident at Abyssinia Market and Coffee House, she put the wooden door sign on “Open” and was left armed with a mask, a face shield and three friends from the neighborhood.

“I see you’re open. That takes a lot of courage,” said Mark Lewis, the first customer of the day, who ordered an almond croissant that filled the room with an aroma of butter and sugar.

“It was this neighborhood that made me change my mind,” Damtew replied. He gestured toward the rows of well-wishes sticky notes that lined his window display in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. “But I was scared.”

Damtew’s experience, part of the coronavirus culture war over facial coatings, reflects a growing problem for retail and service workers across the country who are yelled at and sometimes assaulted after asking customers to wear masks. They have become the primary enforcers of social distancing guidelines within restaurants and shops, often provoking the ire of people who believe that mask requirements violate their rights.

In Florida, a man without a mask was videotaped shoving a Walmart employee who tried to block him from entering the store. At a Family Dollar store in Michigan, a security guard was killed after trying to enforce the mask requirements. A Starbucks customer in California launched an expletive tirade and an explosion on social media against a barista who asked him to wear a mask.

In the Washington region, retail workers face similarly aggressive anti-masks.

Days after the incident at Abyssinia Market and Coffee House, the owner of the Greek Spot restaurant in Washington reported on Facebook that a customer had thrown Plexiglas at an employee who was trying to enforce the guidelines for social distancing.

About a week earlier, in Ted’s Newsletter in Fairfax County, Virginia, a customer threatened to use a fraudulent “mask waiver card” to enter the restaurant with his face uncovered, a restaurant manager said.

Local business owners say most customers are happy to adhere to public health guidelines, but the refusing minority is leaving retail and service workers frustrated and scared as coronavirus cases show signs of recovery in the region.

“Many of us are nervous about going back to work, and do we finally do it and is this the treatment we receive?” Andrew Ceacatura, bartender said in a Ted Newsletter in Washington. “It is crippling, to be honest.”

Ceacatura wore a mask with a smile for his bartender shift Thursday night. But underneath the artificial smile, she prepared for customers to come in with a mask hanging from her chins, as they did every few days since they reopened their meals in the District of Columbia on June 23.

During a brunch shift last week, he said, he asked an older woman three times to “make sure she had her mask on.” She left. On Saturday, he and a manager pleaded with a young woman to order a drunk smoothie to put the mask over her nose. She stared at them as she put it on and stormed out of the building. Ceacatura said he refused to work the Sunday brunch shift recently, for the first time in 3 1/2 years, because “every time it’s busy and stressful, that’s when things tend to overflow.”

On Thursday night, as Ceacatura watched the door and watched the glasses of water he filled and filled, manager Edel McAloon discussed tactics to keep customers unmasked outside his restaurant without causing a fight.

“They tell me it is not a federal law to wear masks. I have learned to answer that it is a restaurant law,” she said, leaning against a table full of hand sanitizer and cleaning spray. “It is difficult to describe how I feel when I see them without masks. It is fury.”

Like McAloon, restaurateurs across the region are discussing how to stay safe when customers refuse to wear masks.

Leah Frelinghuysen, spokesperson for the Ted Newsletter, said the employees “received extensive training before our reopening to stay safe and also to work safely with customers.” They learned to cite guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Restaurant Association, which require customers to wear masks when entering and traveling through establishments, as a reduction strategy.

Blair Beach, general manager of Woodmont Grill in Bethesda, Maryland, said he told his staff to “politely approach” people in the lobby and “remind them” that a Montgomery County ordinance requires masks in most public places.

Many mask confrontations end with a client leaving or covering his face. But some escalate and the police are called. Since June 23, the Maryland State Police has reported at least 17 calls in the DC suburbs related to facial coverage disputes. Officers try to manage the situation through public education and voluntary compliance, said state police spokesman Greg Shipley. Only in the most extreme cases, a Maryland officer would cite an anti-masker for trespassing or failing to obey a legal order, Shipley said.

In Alexandria, where police have responded to about five calls related to face coverage in the past two weeks, officers similarly prioritize reduction through education.

“We don’t want to be in the business of criminally charging someone for not wearing a mask,” said Lt. Courtney Ballantine of the Alexandria Police. “We would encourage them to play by the rules.”

Incidents in Abyssinia and the Greek Point this month have highlighted the risk to local business owners who have chosen to reopen their doors. A local news site, ARLnow, first publicized Damtew’s experience, and the owners of the Greek spot shared theirs on social media. The incidents sparked an avalanche of anger and support from their neighborhoods.

“Our team member was assaulted and threatened while the client destroyed the property and threw everything on the counter, as well as the Plexiglas screen,” wrote the Greek spot on its Facebook page. “This is not what we come to work for, or what anyone should have to endure while working to support themselves and their families.”

The Greek spot declined to discuss the incident further, citing respect for the employee involved.

“There is a concern, a valid concern, obviously, because of these two recent incidents in our area,” said Charlotte Hall, managing director of the Old Town business association. “But this is when a manager or owner needs to step forward and defend her employees.”

However, some business owners have decided not to gradually reopen to allow indoor dining, determining that the health and safety risks remain too high.

Sara Polon, co-founder and CEO of the food delivery service Soupergirl, has not expanded beyond curbside pick-up and delivery, fearing that customers, especially those who refuse to wear masks, may infect children. Vulnerable employees with the virus.

“The responsibility of a landlord when they ask people to leave their homes is agonizing,” he said.

Polon said the only way she feels comfortable asking her employees to come to work is if she agrees to screen them for the coronavirus at frequent intervals. Every Tuesday morning for the past six weeks, Polon has paid more than $ 700 for a doctor to come into her store and evaluate her employees.

“I am duplicating my decision not to make any changes,” he said of the stories he has heard about customers who refuse to wear masks. “There is no schedule to open my doors.”

Other business owners feel they have no choice but to reopen.

Toast, a restaurant management platform, found that as of July 2, restaurants in DC had seen their revenue drop 45% from the previous year, the most drastic loss of any city in the country, according to a spokeswoman. of the company. That leaves many restaurants with mountains of bills to pay and an urgent need for employees to report to work and help attract customers to make ends meet.

Damtew’s 13-year-old son wanted him to keep his restaurant closed after listening to his mother on a phone call explaining that she had been assaulted while alone at work. But if she had kept her restaurant closed for much longer, Damtew said to her son, perhaps she couldn’t have afford to open it again.