VIDEO: Community Rallies Around Coffee Shop After Anti-Mask Rant

STERLING, VA — A customer at a Sterling coffee shop was caught on video Sunday afternoon berating a barista for asking her to wear a mask while inside the shop. The barista offered to bring the customer's order outside. But the customer still went into a diatribe about her rights being violated when the barista asked her to put on a mask or wait outside for her order.

The customer of Ridgetop Coffee & Tea in Sterling accused the barista of "confronting" her for not wearing a mask. "You're actually putting everyone else in danger by confronting me" about not wearing a mask, the customer said.

The barista in the video, Amanda, is the manager of the coffee shop. She told Patch that this is the first time a customer has gotten extremely upset with the mask policy since the coffee shop reopened for business in mid-May under Virginia's phased reopening for businesses. The shop has masks behind the counter that it hands out if a customer forgets to wear one.

"We have the best customers," Amanda said. "Our community that we serve is so amazing. So it caught me off-guard when that happened. Even before the governor asked everyone to wear masks, we've been trying to be very careful and do everything we can to keep not only our employees healthy but everybody in the community."

During the incident Sunday afternoon, the customer told the barista, Amanda, that she had "infringed" on her rights by asking her to go outside if she was not going to put on a mask.

Videos of Americans angry about mask policies have been circulating on social media for months. In some cases, customers have become violent with employees of businesses seeking to enforce a mask policy.

At a July 14 news conference, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam encouraged businesses to step up if a customer isn't following rules. "If a patron of your establishment is violating the rules, you have the ability to say no," he said. "It's just like the signs in so many store windows that say no shirt, no shoes, no service. Now it should be no shirt, no shoes, no mask, no service."

The Ridgetop Coffee customer who took the video said in a Facebook post that seven other people were in the shop at the time, and all of them were wearing masks. Two of them had temporarily removed their masks to take a sip of their drink and that the distance between each of them was significant.

Amanda said she figured the best way to calm down the customer was to let her vent and then get her coffee as quickly as possible so that she would move away from the counter. She then asked the next customer standing six feet behind the anti-mask customer — the customer taking the video — to wait a moment until she had a chance to clean the area really well after the previous customer had gone on her long rant.

Since the incident circulated on social media, Ridgetop Coffee has received wonderful support from the community, Amanda said. "People have been bringing us flowers, and we're busier now than we were before the incident," she said. "We serve an amazing community here, and they have all rallied around us in the face of this."