You know that taunt about hitting someone so hard, his grandkids would feel it? That ‘Red Hen’ restaurant backlash hit them so hard the whole TOWN felt it. Town Council is now in full damage control mode.
What is a town’s emergency fund normally supposed to cover?
Come up with any list you like, it probably won’t cover what this town has been forced to spend it on.
No, it’s not flood damage, sinkholes, or emergency capital spending.
It’s a digital PR campaign… to undo the damage of one ‘Woke’ restauranteur. You remember the story, don’t you? Sarah Sanders and her family sat down to eat, and got chased out of the restaurant? And worse than that, the owner heckled the Sanders family when they left and went to the restaurant across the street!
The whole town got a crash course in customer service.
The customer is ‘profit’ and the staff are ‘overhead’.
If you tell the world that your town is so ‘Woke’ that they don’t really NEED your business, people will stop coming.
It would be bad enough if it just hurt the one restaurant that apparently ‘voted’ to kick Sanders out. Maybe they were expecting to be hailed as ‘heroes’ of the ‘resistance’.
But that stunt hurt the reputation of the whole damn town. Tourist dollars have dried up.
Rockbridge Regional Tourism agreed to spend an additional $5,000 per month from the office’s emergency fund from July through September.
[…] Typically the money is saved. But each locality agreed the region was in desperate need of positive coverage after The Red Hen incident.Director of Marketing Patty Williams said the area is still feeling effects from the controversy — the tourism office received a letter Thursday from a family in Georgia who said they would never come back to the area because of what happened. And during the immediate aftermath of the incident, the tourism office received thousands of phone calls and emails.
“For a town our size, it was a significant impact,” Williams said.
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
They’re doing an entire PR overhaul to try to win back tourists.
Maybe that Red Hen restaurant should foot the bill. You could call it a ‘woke tax’.
Should local residents sue the Restaurant Owner for these expenses?
