Brandi Felt Castellano and her spouse Regina, owners of a Cape Cod restaurant, recently shut down their business to give their employees a “day of kindness” in response to a disturbing uptick in rude customers. As the hospitality industry recovers from the pandemic, with many businesses short-staffed and coping with abrupt surges in business, customer impatience and poor behavior is on the rise, especially in seasonal communities like the Cape.
The message this lesbian couple hopes to spread to employees with their “day of kindness”? That folks are there for them. And for the impatient customers? Chill out and try to be a little more considerate.
Reports the Boston Globe:
“Many [businesses] didn’t survive the pandemic,” Brandi Felt Castellano said of restaurants in [a recent] interview. “For people to be this aggressive towards the ones that have is disheartening.”
This was not always the case. Earlier in the pandemic, customers overwhelmingly exhibited kindness, Felt Castellano said. The restaurant’s motto, which is posted on its website, is “Come as Strangers, Leave as Friends.”
But since restaurants in the state were allowed to fully reopen on May 29, the treatment of the Apt Cape Cod’s 24 employees, many of whom are young and who include the couple’s two children, had gotten worse.
“It’s like abuse,” she said. “It’s things that people are saying that wouldn’t be allowed to be on TV because they would be bleeped. People are always rude to restaurant workers, but this far exceeds anything I’ve seen in my 20 years.”
Felt Castellano, 39, said that some customers had assumed that it would be business as usual, but had not grasped that restaurants were still grappling with staffing and supply shortages. That can mean that wait times are longer and that some items on the menu are not available, which she said has been a source of some of the verbal abuse toward the restaurant’s employees. When a group of diners didn’t get the table that they had requested, she said, they threatened to sue.
“I would say that it is its own epidemic,” she said.
But since Felt Castellano posted their “day of kindness” response on Facebook, the posting has received hundreds of comments in support, and media sources started sharing this story, calling attention to a problem that goes well beyond this one restaurant on the Cape. Some neighboring business on the Cape even got in on the action, reports the Globe, with gift certificates things like ice-cream and water sports for Apt Cape Cod’s employees.
You can read the complete Globe story here.
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