this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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What reason could there possibly be to ban masks other than anti-science COVID denial.
I'd be afraid of this restaurant's sanitary practices at this point. Do they believe in soap or is that also a hoax?
Well, I mean before COVID plenty of places banned wearing anything that obscured your face. Like if you walked into a bank wearing a ski mask, you're probably gonna have a bad time.
It's a restaurant anyway... You gonna eat with a mask on? The ban is kinda unnecessary because it would resolve itself once the mask wearer has their food.
Actually it turns out I was right, you people did not bother to verify anything about this story and you're just assuming stuff to rage over.
The restaurant in the picture is the La Tapenade Mediterranean cafe. This is a real restaurant in the O'Hare airport. This restaurant is a chain that is owned by a company called HMSHost, which a subsidiary of the big Swiss company Dufry. If you go to their website and look up their policies, you'll notice that there is zero mention of masks ANYWHERE. Here is their website, you can verify it yourself:
https://www.hmshost.com/
I thought that my search was flawed, so I tried to look up articles reporting this story but I couldn't find anything. The one and only source to this story is that Tweet. Which means that it's very likely that this story is a hoax made up by some Twitter rando who wanted rage bait.
Which makes sense because it is highly unlikely for a big corporation running a company that runs chain restaurants in international airports to have a policy against masks, especially when the airport in question is in Chicago, which is one of the most liberal cities in America. You simply fell for the bait without questioning it.
Let's hold up on the self-congratulations a second.
There's a very long way between a multinational corporation's published policy and the practice at street-level, even if yesterday is the only report (so far). Is this a franchise? What authority does the store have contractually, or in practice? Is the policy enforced? Is there a history of enforcement? Was this a rogue employee, maybe a recent hire, with a political motivation?
Did you check the original thread https://x.com/AmmahStarr/status/1804608613916328334 for the context of the discussion? Did you check the account for a history of "rage-bait" before dismissing this woman's experience?
Skepticism is important, but caping for corps is seldom necessary. They pay people for that.
This just further proves my point though, you didn't actually verify anything. Not only do we not know any of this for certain because the source didn't provide anything, but people here haven't even bothered to check the authenticity of the story.
The O'Hare website lists the restaurants at the airport and provides their website. The website provided for this restaurant is the HMSHost website. On there, they have a tab that lists their brands, and when you click on this cafe, it lists it's locations. This suggests that the company directly operates their venues. However, their Wikipedia page says that company does manage franchises, but no source was provided for this claim. Based on the available evidence, it's best to assume that the restaurant is directly run by the company. If that's the case then their policies on their website are the ones that apply to the restaurants, and they don't appear to have any sort of ban on masks.
In the thread you linked, this person claims that an employee demanded that she takes off her mask. She later in the thread mentioned to another user that the employee said repeatedly that "it's the policy". However, I haven't been able to find such policies anywhere. If you can find then I would greatly appreciate a source. She provides no further details or context. Based on the available information, there are possibilities:
I personally think is most likely to be the case. That doesn't mean that 1 and 2 can't happen or didn't, I'm just pointing out that the probability of this story being true is rather low unless we're presented with concrete evidence that prove otherwise.
Did you follow your own advice? Because her account does indeed have a very long history rage bait type content and her thread provides little substance. She claims it happened but didn't provide any details besides two very vague remarks about an employee and a picture of the resturant. This all could've happened, but the only thing we have is her word and based on her account history, her word is not that credible.
Raging over stories that have a high likelyhood of being false just because you hate corporations isn't a virtue. Criticism still needs to be based on something real in order for it to be valid.
And yet, in the end, yours only amounts to what you consider "likely".