A busboy's lie has cost a Michigan restaurant thousands in losses after it was forced to close its doors when the employee falsely claimed he had contracted the deadly coronavirus, WWTV reported.
The unnamed staff member at Timbers Seafood and Steakhouse in Ludington was apparently just looking to have a day off work, and decided to use the pandemic as his excuse.
“It was heartbreaking,” David Hritco, general manager at Timbers, told WWTV. “I worried about my staff. I worried about, well now do I have Covid now?”
“It is such a touchy subject,” he added. “We had to shut down business for the safety.”
While the summer tourism season signalled the perfect opportunity for Timbers to bounce back, completely shutting down this past weekend seriously hurt that progress, especially since that meant canceling a wedding rehearsal dinner.
“Yes it hurt our business,” Hritco said of the sudden closure. “It’s our second busiest weekend of the year.”
But as it turns out, all that was for naught as the boy admitted Saturday night to having made up the entire thing.
He hadn't tested positive for coronavirus after all, and his "father" who called the restaurant to say otherwise was actually one of his friends trying to help him get a day off work.
“Well, ‘sorry’ unfortunately cost us thousands of dollars worth of business,” the general manager said. “He doesn’t know what he did and I feel terrible for him because this is a young kid that made a mistake."
"But," he added, "this is now a police matter.”
As he explained, “Incidents like this don’t do anything to reaffirm that it’s not a hoax.”
h/t: WWTV
