FOUL FARMER
Trenton Farmers Market stand employee threatens to kill customer
WARNING: THE VIDEO AT TRENTONIAN.COM CONTAINS EXPLICIT LANGUAGE
LAWRENCE » A Trenton Farmers Market stand employee’s temper heated up last month quicker than a tomato in a grill pan when a customer confronted her about how she was treating an elderly Asian woman.
“Don’t f**king tell me how to do my job,” the Cranberry Hall Farm employee says in a video that has been widely circulated on social media. “When I’m over here, they disrespect my customers and they disrespect us. The busload that they bring in.”
The customer who addressed the employee’s behavior was filming the whole encounter as the stand worker tried to grab the woman’s phone out of her hand.
“I saw you from over there treating her like crap because she can’t speak English,” the customer said. “You don’t have a right to talk to people like that.”
With the camera rolling, the worker identified as Betty Lipick, of Hightstown, snapped.
“I’m not going to let this f**king b*tch come in my place and talk s**t to me about my motherf**king job,” Lipick screams, cussing out the customer a couple more times. “You don’t work in this market and you don’t understand what we go through every day ... I swear to God, I’m going to kill this b*tch. You don’t know me ... You don’t f**king know me.”
The epic freakout, which transpired in mid August, allegedly started because Lipick claimed the Asian woman stole from her stand in the past.
Dennis Roohr, owner of Cookstown-based Cranberry Hall Farm, said Wednesday that he first saw the video on Sept. 7 when he met with the customer who was filming. Roohr called the video, “horrible, reprehensible, inexcusable, indefensible and disgusting” and said it is not representative of his farm.
“I farmed for 50 years and this is the first time that I ever had a situation where someone has said Cranberry Hall Farms has been inappropriate to another person,” a hurt Roohr said. “Every one of my farm workers who have wanted to have residency, Hondurans and Mexicans, I’ve helped them get their own homes. We’ve had Mexican workers that didn’t speak English and we took them three nights a week to New Egypt to the school to learn English. And then to get this, it’s not the way we operate. I find this inexcusable and I make no excuses. I just make a complete embarrassed apology.”
Roohr had initially let Lipick keep her job on the condition that “this doesn’t ever happen in even a lesser fashion” and if she sought anger management counseling that the farm would pay for. But since, Roohr said they agreed upon a “mutual decision for termination.”
“She is not an employee of the farm anymore but I take this serious enough that I’m still going to pay for counseling if she will attend the counseling,” Roohr said, noting Lipick wrote a letter of apology. “I have never been informed of an issue either verbally from the market or in writing from the market about her. This is the first incident that has been reported to me.”
Lipick also took to social media to explain her side of the story.
“This video of me is crazy but I am not,” the fired employee wrote on Facebook. “She butted in something she didn’t know the full situation and I am not racist and don’t hate the elderly.”
Additionally, Lipick said “all employees have the right to be dealt with by management not someone who thinks she knows the whole situation.”
“I am sorry some people see me this way but everyone has days they can be pushed to react,” Lipick wrote. “I am sorry my stand has to judged on one day when I have worked there for 8 years and many happy customers.”
Explaining her actions, Lipick said she “didn’t threat [sic] to kill (the customer) in the woods.”
“But the senior place brings the elderly in bus load and she already got away with stealing from our stand,” Lipick said, adding she knows she went too far. “But I am not sure anyone working would appreciate a phone in their face trying to get them to react ... this video was not supposed to be shown.”
After video of the incident surfaced on social media, the Trenton Farmers Market Board of Directors voted to ban Lipick from working in the market, manager Jack Ball said Wednesday.
“We certainly did not condone what she did,” Ball said. “What she did was absolutely unacceptable.” Ball, a 38-year-manager of the Trenton Farmers Market and former mayor of Ewing, acknowledged that some customers don’t speak English, “which makes it a little bit more of a challenge.” “No matter what, the old saying is, ‘the customer is always right,’” Ball said. “And without the customers, there is no Trenton Farmers Market.”
Ball said the market tried to hammer out an agreement with the customer who shot the video to reach a “fair and decent conclusion” before the video was released but it didn’t pan out.
“Management and the board values all of our customers and wants everyone regardless of whether they can speak English or even if they are sometimes, perhaps, maybe a little difficult,” Ball said. “You have to deal with them and you have to treat them like gold and that’s what the Trenton Farmers Market is all about.”