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A Saskatoon coffeehouse is feeling perked up after the community rallied around it following a social media post that denounced it for its mask policy.
Over the weekend, a post on social media was circulating criticizing City Perks Coffeehouse for its mask policy, which requires customers to wear a mask while they are moving around the cafe but then taking it off after they’re seated.
The post began with: “If you want to be bullied, visit City Perk(s) cafe in Saskatoon.” The person who wrote it then went on to complain about having to wear a mask and give their name and phone number for potential contact tracing, and accused the cafe of power tripping.
City Perks Coffeehouse manager Tania Friesen told Brent Loucks on Wednesday morning that the cafe has very limited space, so it’s taking every precaution possible to help protect customers from COVID-19.
Friesen says one thing the cafe is doing is have one door designated as an entrance and another door designated as an exit to avoid two-way traffic.
“We have our cafe policies posted on our entrance door and the mask policy is also posted on the exit door because, of course, we do get some people cruising up to that door. So our policy is that we ask people to wear masks walking through the cafe, but you can take them off at your table, of course, once you are seated,” said Friesen.
Friesen says the woman who wrote the social media post wanted to come into the cafe without a mask, saying she was unable to wear one.
“It’s not our job to investigate why they can’t. I didn’t ask her to put on a mask when she said she couldn’t,” said Friesen. “But we had two policies and she didn’t want to abide by either of them and that’s where the confrontation unfolded.”
Once the post started getting traction, Friesen says the community really stepped up to support City Perks.
“I think the overwhelming response has been ‘Thank you’ and ‘Good for you guys,’ ‘Sorry to hear this,’ ” said Friesen. “It really seemed like the intention of the post was to deter people from being at the cafe and we’ve had people showing up to support us, so that’s been really awesome. We have a dedicated long-term clientele base who’ve been great.”
Friesen says she thinks the cafe is dealing with everything well and adds incidents like this are not common and generally everyone is pretty happy to comply with the policies.
