Appearing on CNN on Monday afternoon, an ice cream shop owner from Massachusetts described customers going berserk on him and his teenaged employees after he shut his store down because they refused to use safe-distancing and other pandemic rules.
Speaking with host Brianna Keilar, Polar Cave owner Mark Lawrence from Mashpee explained that he opened his shop -- only to be overwhelmed with customers who ended up abusing his employees when he decided to shut down for health safety issues.
"We had everything planned and I worked closely with the National Association of Protocols," the shop owner explained. "I talked to different owners at ice cream shops around the world in our Facebook group. I pretty much took all the best precautions and I thought I had a good plan and everything was going well and people were ordering online at least an hour ahead. but by 5:00 or so a group of kids pulled in and in a space about 40 minutes, my 50 spot parking lot was full and we were only expecting a 20 audience for that particular time"
"So basically the wheels fall off the bus because we could not produce that much product to get out the door in a timely enough fashion" he continued. "People start to get very agitated. We had curbside pick up and some people would get out of their car and we were like, 'Get back in your car, we don't have ice cream. We are supposed to close at 8:00, but last customer got served at 9:30. And the young lady [employee] who had been outside, came in and said 'Can I go home instead of clean-up on the inside?' and I said 'Of course you've done more than enough.'"
"Then she went home and about twenty minutes later I got a text that she's resigned because of how customers were talking to her after what happened and how people were talking to her," he recalled. "You can't broadcast the language, I mean F-bombs were flying like snowflakes."
"I know that you said, Mark, that one of your employees was called the C-word, I think we can use our imagination that this is inappropriate language. You're talking about kids," Keilar responded, "and this is the lowest feelings that I know you ever had... where do you go from here?"
"I posted on the [Facebook] page that we closed, this is not working, pretty much, he replied. "I got my daughter to create an online form and tweaked the form that we had so we had time slots and we set up certain times. It works really well. I made a whole new Facebook page of a hidden group and sent the invitations out to see how we'll do on Saturday and Saturday was a whole new ball game -- it was wonderful."
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