Restaurant Offers Discount If You Throw Your Mask In The Trash

Anti-mask restaurant offers a discount if you don’t wear a mask, and ugh

In the anti-mask community, the loudest morons are of the “government can’t control me” and “but my freedumbs” ilk. But there’s a less-covered anti-mask faction that I like to call, “granola maskholes,” because they’re all about psuedo-science, and like, needing to breath fresh air, and not believing in vaccines because their shaman told them not to, or whatever. At a health food cafe in Mendocino, California (a wealthy vacation town in Northern California), a restaurant is taking a stand against California’s mask mandate and offering a 50% discount if you trash your mask, and eyeroll please.

A sign in the window at Fiddleheads Cafe says, “Throw your mask in our trash bin and receive 50% off your order” and a video of the shocking sign has been shared widely on TikTok.

https://www.tiktok.com/@poppyseedling/video/6945317144494181638

Fiddleheads Cafe owner Chris Castleman tells SFGate.com that if you don’t like his sign, eat somewhere else. “You can go anywhere else in this county right now to eat and pretend that you’re in a safe environment,” Castleman says.

SFGate.com reports that despite getting a fine for breaking health orders back in June 2020, the owner has not faced any problems from the health department over his new sign or the fact that nobody in his business is wearing them. “I made a to-go order here since it was the nearest cafe,” someone on Yelp wrote. “When we arrived we were shocked that not one person was wearing a mask including the workers. No social distancing, no masks, and no limited capacity….The workers were very disrespectful as well, they claim to not judge and let people make their own choices but they seem to judge me for choosing to wear a mask and have concern for others.”

“As far as I can tell, there’s nothing illegal about him giving a discount to people who throw masks away,” Ted Williams, 5th District Supervisor of Mendocino County, SFGATE.com “… if it happens to be the mask that they’re wearing, that seems to go against the health order and just common sense and caring for neighboring businesses and residents.

So if you throw away “a” mask, but not the one you’re wearing, you’re still within California’s mask mandate? But if you throw away the mask on your face that does actually violate the local and state health orders. Mendocino County Code Enforcement Supervisor John Burkes told local news website Redheaded Blackbelt that he is “investigating as we speak.”

https://www.tiktok.com/@poppyseedling/video/6945317144494181638

The owner also put up a second sign saying that people in his restaurant “may not be vaccinated. Please respect their freedom to live naturally” or that they may not “wear a mask” so “please respect their freedom to breathe.” So yeah, real anti-mask hippie stuff going on in here.

“I think there’s this feeling that the town has, that they’ve been working so hard to do all this right and then there’s this guy just sort of embarrassing them,” a local business owner told SFGate.com about the cafe’s COVID attitudes.

Castleman tells SFGate.com that his mask boycott is his way of taking a stand against California’s strict COVID-19 safety measure and pointed to states like Florida and Texas where they wouldn’t bat an eye at a sign like this. Castleman, like so many other anti-maskers, is relying on the false claim that California has had the same COVID outcomes as free-for-all states like Florida and Texas, as if to suggest that California should just be open like Florida because it’s all the same in the end. Allow me to hit Mr. Castleman with some facts. It’s actually not all the same outcome, because California currently has the lowest COVID-19 positivity rate in the entire country and it got there by being really effing strict about COVID-19 safety measures.

He says that he won’t visit any establishment that requires masks and will “call ahead” to find out if they enforce the state’s mask mandate, which makes me think this dude doesn’t go anywhere. However, he says he wouldn’t protest another establishment’s mask rules, he just won’t go there, and I’m literally not going to applaud this man for doing the bare minimum. What a damn mess.