Student dorms aren’t the only buildings shuttering their doors at the University of Missouri due to plummeting enrollment.
The owner of a Columbia, Mo., doughnut shop announced he was closing it down this week, citing “a correlation between the student population decline and our sales.”
Strange Donuts made the announcement with posts on Facebook and Instagram featuring an image of the disgraced “safe space enforcer,” Melissa Click.
The now-deleted posts said: “Effective immediately we are closing the como loco [Columbia location]. It’s been a lot of fun but there has been a correlation between the student population decline and our sales. We are planning some huge things for Strange and need the energy elsewhere.”
Click, of course, is the former Mizzou assistant communications professor who famously requested “some muscle” to evict student journalists from a “media-free safe space” during the November 2015 protest. Click was eventually charged with third-degree assault and fired from her position at the University of Missouri. She landed a new job as a lecturer at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., in September of 2016.
Jason Bockman, the owner of the Columbia doughnut shop, deleted the announcement several hours after it was posted and issued an apology on Thursday. Apparently, more than a few snowflakes were offended by his post.
Bockman now says that the Columbia doughnut shop had been performing poorly for about a year and a half.
The store was already struggling to keep up with its target market — students — because they are gone during the summer, Bockman said. When he read reports that MU will see student enrollment tumble in the fall, he decided that the company needed to focus its resources elsewhere.
He also had this to say about the picture:
Bockman said the photo he used was intended to make fun of himself for failing and was not meant to make light of declining student enrollment at MU. He said humor is the tone of the company’s brand.
“I never delete posts, but I did this time because it was clearly offending so many people, and that upset me,” Bockman said. “I mean, I really try to live my life of inclusion and service to my community, and it was really upsetting that it offended so many people.
“Even my friends were like, ‘Hey, what was this about?’ I messed up, man. I really missed what I was going for with that.”
Despite Bockman’s repentance, lefty activists are savaging Strange Donuts on Facebook.
Via Fox News:
“Strange Donuts are those nasty bad donuts you buy for the people at the office you don’t like,” reads a comment from one Facebook user. “Oh ya and they can’t admit that so they blame college town activism for why they flunked small business ownership 101.”
One commenter alleged the shop’s staff of being racist.
“1. That post with Melissa Click was trash,” reads the posting. “2. Declining students isn’t the reason your sales dropped, but s—-y customer service and racism might be.”
It’s so awkward you’d try and correlate student protest/activism and marginalized students feeling threatened/unsafe with low sales. How tone deaf. Thanks for the apology, but it’s 24 hours too late. And as dozens of your new reviews point out, this isn’t the only time you all have missed the mark. BYE.
Angry snowflakes are also trashing Strange Donuts on Yelp and threatening to stage “doughnut protests.” Of course.
Here’s the Strange Donuts crew during happier times when they first opened in Columbia in the summer of 2015:
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