sAVe oUr cAFe
Angry customers sign petition
Scores of irate customers have backed a petition to keep a popular Rutherglen cafe open.
Devastated staff at the Big Coffee Cup in Rutherglen Exchange shopping centre face redundancy – after being told the cafe’s lease isn’t being renewed when it runs out in July. Centre bosses dropped the bombshell news last week and, adding insult to injury, informed the owners that another company had already been signed up to take over the premises.
The Big Coffee Cup has been a fixture in the centre for 10 years, and co-owner Jennifer Flood told the Reformer: “We’re devastated. The girls were crying their eyes out.”
Devastated workers at a cafe in Rutherglen Exchange shopping centre are losing their jobs – after centre bosses found new tenants without telling them.
The Big Coffee Cup will close in just a few weeks time, resulting in 13 redundancies.
Staff were oblivious to the situation when the cafe’s owner, Jennifer Flood, received a letter stating the lease was due to expire in July.
However, when Jennifer and her coowner contacted centre management with a view to renewing the lease, they were told another business had already been offered – and accepted – the premises.
The Big Coffee Cup has been a popular fixture in the centre for a decade, and staff, many of whom have worked there for years, were in tears when told the news.
A petition to keep them in the centre has already attracted hundreds of signatures.
Jennifer told the Reformer: “We are absolutely devastated.
“We have 13 staff and some of the girls have been with us for nine, 10 years. They were crying their eyes out and now they’re working for the next seven weeks with this hanging over them.
“They’ve been loyal to us for so long. All the centre’s management said to us was that we ‘knew the lease would be up this year’; as if we should have known this was coming.”
Jennifer went on: “They must have known months ago that they were bringing someone else in.
“We had no word from them whatsoever until we received a recorded delivery letter saying our lease was up on July 15, and we phoned them to ask about renewing it.
“That’s when they told us they’d already signed someone else up and were looking for something more contemporary.
“To get nothing but a letter about something this important is very hard to take.”
The cafe has many loyal customers, and Jennifer, who co-owns the Cup and another store in Coatbridge with Linda Watson, feels shopping centre bosses have misjugded what local people want.
She said: “This isn’t Princes Square or the Buchanan Galleries in Glasgow.
“The locals love us here – we do soup, sandwiches, we cook for them – we provide a good service here and I can only guess they’re maybe getting a franchise in to replace us.
“Everybody’s devastated. We have built a trade up here, we have built goodwill, we’ve been the hub of this centre.”
The Coffee Cup will be the second small cafe to close in a matter of a few weeks. The Black Poppy on Stonelaw Road shut following a row with South Lanarkshire Council over a proposed rent increase.
Despite repeated attempts, the Reformer did not receive a comment from Rutherglen Exchange bosses.