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Missouri Doughnut Store Owner Blames Protests for Business Failure

Missouri Doughnut Store Owner Blames Protests for Business Failure

Consequences…

WAJ video screenshot, okay to use

The University of Missouri isn’t the only organization suffering due to the campus protests of 2015. A local business owner is blaming the incident for the closure of his shop.

Heat Street reported:

U Missouri Doughnut Store Owner Suggests Melissa Click, Protestors Drove Him Out of Business

To accompany a post announcing its closure, a University of Missouri doughnut store posted a notorious photo of former professor Melissa Click, one of the key figures from the protests that rocked the school last year.

“It’s been a lot of fun but there has been a correlation between the student population and the decline in our sales,” Strange Donuts’ Facebook post said. The company’s other two Missouri locations remain open.

Strange Donuts had the misfortune of opening its Columbia branch in March 2015, just months before contentious protests caught national media attention.

Viral video from the demonstrations showed Melissa Click, a communications instructor, calling for “muscle” to remove a student reporter. In the end, the student protests contributed to the resignation of the university’s president and chancellor. As Heat Street reported, administrators worried about a “PR nightmare” and were deluged with emails from parents, alumni, fans and donors outraged with how Mizzou had handled the protests.

The doughnut shop’s owner, Jason Bockman, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he had underestimated how much business would lag during the summer. But the real problem seems to have been the sharp decline in the number of students attending Mizzou, which has been partially attributed to the protests. Last fall, freshman enrollment was down more than 20 percent from the previous year.

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Comments

notamemberofanyorganizedpolicital | May 10, 2017 at 12:13 pm

Thanks for this nugget.

RE: “real problem seems to have been the sharp decline in the number of students attending Mizzou, which has been partially attributed to the protests. Last fall, freshman enrollment was down more than 20 percent from the previous year.”