‘Enough’s enough… we are here to make a living’ Food Fare co-owner says shoplifting at root of growing violence; grocery chain does not practise racial profiling By: Carol Sanders Posted: 7:16 PM CDT Wednesday, May. 22, 2024 Last Modified: 9:13 PM CDT Wednesday, May. 22, 2024 Updates

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This article was published 22/05/2024 (789 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Five intruders wearing hoodies and medical masks, armed with bats and a baton, enter the West End store.

They immediately confront and shove a male employee, but quickly zero in on a staff member wearing Food Fare’s signature red apron.

Someone punches him in the head and the bloody attack begins.

“They came after him mostly — the supervisor in charge,” Food Fare co-owner Munther Zeid said Wednesday, inviting the Free Press to review surveillance video on his phone of the May 14 attack that sent the supervisor and two other employees to hospital.

Zeid said he wanted to set the record straight about the attack at the Portage Avenue and Burnell Street store.

A 17-year-old youth alleged to have beaten the three employees — men aged 19, 22 and 46 — with brass knuckles in the May 14 violence was charged and then released.

Zeid said baseball bats are placed in various areas of the store “to grab just in case.” In the video, the supervisor grabs one to defend himself, but he’s overpowered.

“Look at the batons, the brass knuckles — look at how they’re going at him,” Zeid said in his cramped office at the chain’s Silver Heights location. “He got six stitches in the head (from) the baseball bat. There’s blood all over the place.”

Police have not made any other arrests.

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There have been several violent incidents at the store, including a widely publicized April 28 altercation involving a supervisor and an Indigenous woman accused of shoplifting a package of hotdogs. The woman was allegedly punched, and her child witnessed the incident.

The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs issued a news release denouncing the store for racism and terminated its business relationship with the stores.

The employee was suspended, but the store has been targeted for retribution. A video posted May 3 on Facebook shows three men — two carrying Mohawk warrior flags — aggressively demanding to see the store worker who punched the woman.

“Let him know there’s some angry natives who came by,” one of the men tells a female store manager.

“We’re going to keep coming back until he’s fired,” another said. “Laying a hand on shoplifters — that s—t’s going to have to stop,” said another.

“We should be talking to the family,” one of the protesters says of the Zeids, who own the store. When another employee approaches and asks if he can help, he’s asked if he’s a family member and he says that he is.

He says the store’s statement is posted online, they’re talking to the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, and agree that what happened on April 28 was wrong. One of the demonstrators tells him the store has to fire the employee involved in the incident.

“We can be here every f—king day and shut (the store) down.”

The Zeid family member says, “You’re being loud and aggressive… that’s not helpful,” and he asks the woman recording the confrontation to stop and for them to leave the store.

“This store is on Treaty One territory — you’re on our land,” one of them says before leaving.

Zeid said one of the store employees who arrived at work the following day was attacked by a man who’d been waiting in the parking lot. He showed surveillance footage of the employee parking, and the assailant taking a swing at him before running away.

Zeid said it wasn’t a direct hit and it wasn’t reported to police.

The violence on May 14 occurred shortly after 6:30 p.m. Zeid’s brother, who manages the store, and another male employee had just left for the day.

Four of the five attackers had been in the store earlier that day, Zeid said.

“They’d come in about an hour before this incident, being loud — ‘You can’t touch us; you think you can attack us the way you attacked the lady and the kid,’” said Zeid who went to the store minutes after the assaults.

“This manager here that got it bad went up to them and said, ‘If you’re here to shop, shop. If not, please leave.’ In the end, they walked around, shoplifted. The manager took stuff away from them and said ‘get out.’ They come back an hour later — with a big friend of theirs — and this is what happens.”

“We never know what to expect.”

He shared surveillance video of the Indigenous woman slipping a package of hotdogs into her bag in the April incident.

“It seems nobody wants to accept the truth and reality of the initial story,” he said. “They believe a lady walked in, we racially profiled her and we hit her. No. She shoplifted. If she didn’t shoplift, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. If my guy handled it differently, we possibly wouldn’t be.”

The AMC did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

When “his guy” confronted the woman about the hotdogs then tried to grab her bag, she took a swing at him and missed as he backed up and he then took a swing at her and hit her in the head, Zeid said.

“In the heat of the moment, what would you do?” said Zeid, who isn’t sure how he would have reacted and hasn’t decided what to do about the suspended employee. He said the store at Portage and Burnell recovers close to $6,000 a month in merchandise that shoplifters have tried to steal.

“You get to the point where you say ‘enough’s enough.’ I’m not going to allow this shoplifting to happen anymore.”

Since the April 28 incident, the amount of shoplifting at that store has quadrupled and he said it appears the thieves are trying to provoke store staff to react so they can record it.

“You’ve got somebody trying to steal, and another person on the aisle like this” he gestured, holding up his phone. “It’s staged. They’re waiting for a reaction, to start more of an issue.

“We are not going to be scared or intimidated by somebody holding up their phone and recording us,” he said.

The son of Palestinian immigrants who started the Winnipeg business said his staff do not racially profile anyone.

“I stopped you because you’re shoplifting — I stop everybody. I’ve stopped my own kind,” he said.

“I can’t afford to let people in my store to steal. We are here to make a living.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca

Carol Sanders
Legislature reporter

Carol Sanders is a reporter at the Free Press legislature bureau. The former general assignment reporter and copy editor joined the paper in 1997. Read more about Carol.

Every piece of reporting Carol produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.