Wichita cafe owner overwhelmed by support, business after story about shutdown woes
A week ago, Parsnipity Cafe owner Cynthia Wilson was despondent.
Her restaurant, which operates on the ground floor of the Epic Center at 301 N. Main, was suffering, mostly because many of her regular customers are federal employees whose offices are in the building. Because of the government shutdown, they weren’t at work, so they weren’t in her cafe. Sales were down drastically, and she was cutting both cafe and employee hours.
She shared her story with the HuffPost, a national website, and it posted a story featuring Wilson and the cafe. Its premise was that the shutdown was having negative ripple effects beyond the pain it was causing federal employees.
One week later, the shutdown continues, but things have improved for Parsnipity. Wilson said that since the publication of the HuffPost story — and a subsequent story on Dining with Denise — she’s been overwhelmed with generosity and support from the Wichita community.
“After the article in The Eagle came out, out people started coming into the cafe,” she said. “We weren’t even ready for it. It was never ending customers. Some of them even brought the article to show us.”
On Friday, the cafe brought in triple the amount of sales it had the previous Friday, and the cafe also landed a big catering job. The crowds have continued into this week, Wilson said, and “we went from feeling despair to feeling buoyant.”
The boost of support helped the cafe financially, she said. They were able to pay some bills and give their employees — including a couple of special needs lumpia rollers from Goodwill Industries — some of their hours back.
The generosity inspired Wilson to want to reciprocate, and she’s since made an offer to Epic Center employees being affected by the shutdown. She’ll let them charge their meals at the cafe until the shutdown ends, and they’ll have 30 days after it ends to pay the bill.
Wilson, a Washington state native who has lived in Wichita for 10 years, said she was touched by the outpouring of support from her adopted hometown.
“I think that when something as big as a government shutdown happens, people feel helpless and they feel like they want to do something,” she said. “This is something they felt that they could do to help in a small way. They’re never going to be able to help the whole situation, but here, they were able to at least help one business.”
Meanwhile, national media attention has continued at Parsnipity ever since the HuffPost article was published. Since, Wilson has done two interviews with the BBC, and a BBC global crew will be in her cafe today to film a roundtable discussion about the shutdown. The HuffPost article also got a mention last week on the MSNBC program “All In with Chris Hayes.”
It’s all been overwhelming but also inspiring, Wilson said. The cafe isn’t in the clear yet, but it’s doing better than it was before she spoke up.
That wasn’t her main goal, though.
“The reason that I decided to go public with our situation even though it was a little bit embarrassing for me — you never want to admit you’re not at the top of you game — is I really wanted the public to understand that it wasn’t just the 800,000 federal workers being affected. All of us, every single one of us in the country, are being affected in some way.”
This story was originally published January 23, 2019 at 9:26 AM.
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