Biz vic: Get a job, looters!
A black store owner ripped looters for destroying her Bronx shop this week — telling them in a viral video to “get a job” and stop stealing.
“We’ve been here all night cleaning up. [They] tell me ‘Black Lives Matter.’ They’re lying,” said Lucy Hosley, 69, outside Valentine Deli in a video posted to YouTube Tuesday after the raid earlier that morning.
“You wanted to loot the store. You needed money. Get a job like I do. Stop stealing.”
In the video, debris and broken glass can be seen on the sidewalk outside the Valentine Avenue deli.
“You said Black Lives Matter — why don’t you choke me?” railed Hosley, who has co-owned the business for six years. “I’m black. Look what you did to my store.”
“This is our neighborhood. We’re trying to build it up, and you tear it down,” she added.
Hosley later told The Post Wednesday that the store’s co-owner, Mustafa Alsaedi, has its security cameras linked to his phone and called her when he noticed people ransacking the place.
She arrived to find around 30 young men inside pillaging the shelves. They came with tools to break into the cash register, she said.
“It made me sick to my stomach to see the business we’ve been growing for six years destroyed in front of my eyes,” she said.
“We were lucky in that we didn’t have to close during the coronavirus,” she added, “but we have six employees who need salaries to feed their families.”
Fortunately, generous donors have rushed to get the deli back on its feet. A GoFundMe page set up to help Hosley rebuild has raised more than $80,000 since Wednesday.
“At first I felt anger towards the looters. But I can’t let hate consume me,” Hosley told The Post.
“Many of them have been brought up in a society that believes they are worth nothing and they are acting on that.
“But I won’t let them win,” she added. “We will rebuild this store, and it will serve this community again.”
Officials on Wednesday said New York City is seeing a mix of peaceful protesters, anarchists and local looters amid unrest over George Floyd’s police-involved death in Minneapolis.
The looters have been described as homegrown criminals who, Mayor de Blasio said, have “nothing to do with the protest whatsoever.”