Cooper said her cafe manager was calmly trying to handle the situation.
“The lady was just not having it and she said: ‘Nope, we’re going to deal with this right now’, and she apparently turned around and threw the hot Americano in [our manager’s] face, followed by the cup.
“It wasn’t even a takeaway cup. It was a ceramic cup.”
Coope said the woman then grabbed her child and ran out of the cafe. Cooper’s husband, Aaron, quickly arrived and tried to find the woman, but had no luck.
“We haven’t been able to find her. We’ve got her on camera, so we’ll know what she looks like if she comes back into the village.”
‘We just want kindness’
After the incident, Cooper said the manager who had been struck in the face was “inconsolable”.
“She was so upset.”
She says other customers were about when this happened, and her team was “gobsmacked”.
“I just don’t know what’s going on with people these days. We just want kindness. We just want respect. We’re doing a job that we love to do. I’m incredibly proud of my staff and the way that they carry themselves. They work bloody hard.”
Frances Cooper said incidents such as these make staff “more on edge”. Photo / John Borren
Yet, this is not the only incident of her staff experiencing abuse.
Cooper said in their Maungatapu bakery, a sizeable male customer came in and “absolutely abused my 16-year-old daughter behind the counter and threw doughnuts at her”.
This was apparently due to the doughnut prices. “When she got abused, she ended up coming out the back just absolutely beside herself and like dry retching.”
Covid and costs
Cooper said since Covid-19, people seemed to be much more intolerant and felt they had the right to do whatever they wanted.
“They think they can go in, abuse staff and be impatient.”
She said customers also got frustrated over the prices of cafe food and drinks.
“In hospitality we have to put our prices up because every year the wages go up, and every year it seems like products go up.
“We’ve got people coming in and they’re really pissed off because we’re putting our prices up, but at the end of the day, if we don’t put our prices up, we can’t make money.”
The Weekend Sun reached out to Hospitality New Zealand — a membership organisation that advocates for people in the industry — to see how many reports of verbal or physical abuse it has had from our region this year.
Hospitality New Zealand regional manager Luke van Veen said the organisation hadn’t received any reports of physical or verbal abuse from Bay of Plenty hospitality staff recently.
“If any of our members do experience this kind of behaviour, though, we’d encourage them to let us know so we can advocate for measures to ensure the safety and wellbeing of workers in the industry,” van Veen said.
“If staff are abused, they can call on the support of their management, and if needed, the police to address the situation.”
Workers ‘on edge’
The staff member who was assaulted with the coffee cup did not want to go to the police, Cooper said.
Despite the incident and suffering a black eye, the manager had continued working as normal.
Cooper said instances such as these made staff “more on edge”.
“It makes my husband want to put up a plastic screen in front of the counter to protect the girls, but then what does that look like?
“We don’t want people to feel uncomfortable when they come through the door, but there’s a small minority of people that think it’s their right to lay their hands on people.”
