Lily Damtew had resolved to completely shutter her Ethiopian coffee shop after a maskless man spat at her feet and hurled chicken and rice at her window when she asked him to please cover his face. How could she brew coffee and cut quiche, she believed, in worry that he would return with a revenge?
But on Saturday, just before 7: 30 a.m., six days after the incident at Abyssinia Market and Coffee House, she turned her wood door sign to “Open” and stood armed with a mask, a face guard and three neighborhood pals.
” I see you’re open. That takes a great deal of courage,” stated Mark Lewis, the first customer of the day, who purchased an almond croissant that filled the space with a fragrance of butter and sugar.
” It was this area that changed my mind,” Damtew responded. She gestured to the rows of Post-it notes with well-wishes that covered her shop in Old Town Alexandria, Va “However I was scared.”
Damtew’s experience, part of the coronavirus culture war over face coverings, reflects a growing truth for retail and service workers throughout the country who are chewed out and sometimes assaulted after asking patrons to use masks. They have actually ended up being the main enforcers for social distancing guidelines inside restaurants and shops, often drawing the ire of people who think mask requirements infringe on their rights.
In the Washington area, retail employees are likewise confronting aggressive anti-maskers.
Days after the incident at Abyssinia Market and Coffee Home, the owner of the Greek Area restaurant in Northwest Washington reported on Facebook that a client had thrown plexiglass at a worker who attempted to implement social distancing standards.
About a week previously, at Ted’s Publication in Fairfax County’s Merrifield location, a consumer threatened to use a fraudulent “mask exemption card” to get in the restaurant barefaced, a dining establishment manager stated.
Local business owners say the majority of patrons gladly abide by public health guidelines, however the minority who refuse are leaving retail and service workers frustrated and scared as coronavirus cases reveal signs of rebounding in the region
” A lot of us fidget to come back to work, and then we finally do and this is the treatment we get?” stated Andrew Ceacatura, a bartender at Ted’s Publication on Capitol Hill. “It is soul-crushing, to be honest.”
Ceacatura used a mask with a smile on it for his bartending shift Thursday night. But below the artificial smile, he braced himself for customers to stroll in with a mask hanging from their chins, as they had every couple of days because indoor dining in the District reopened June 23.
Throughout a breakfast shift recently, he said, he asked an older woman three times to “make sure she had her mask on.” She left. On Saturday, he and a supervisor pleaded with a girl ordering a boozy milks