Cape Town - Patrons at the Spur in Worcester say they were served a raw deal when they became the unwitting participants in a staged robbery.
Customers said they were traumatised, one almost suffering a heart attack, after two “armed men” held up the restaurant on Tuesday morning.
It came just two days after a real robbery at the Spur in the Tyger Valley Shopping Centre on Sunday.
Maria-Lize Visser wrote on Facebook that she and her two-month-old son had just sat down for breakfast when the “robbers” walked into the San Diego Spur in the Mountain Mill mall.
They began shouting: “Get down! Everybody get down!”
She grabbed her son and hid behind a dividing wall. The next moment, one of the “robbers” was at her side. He screamed at her to hand over her cellphone.
“Net daar, piepie ek myself sopnat (Right there, I wet myself),” she wrote.
But the “robbery” turned out to have been staged by the manager as a training exercise for her staff, said Spur chief executive Pierre van Tonder. The “robbers” were a pair of actors.
“We are very diligent about security…” he said, “But this is a very unfortunate incident.
“I cannot for the life of me fathom what (the manager) was thinking, letting customers into the restaurant.”
He said the manager had “good intentions” but had left customers severely traumatised.
One of the customers had almost suffered a heart attack.
Cape Argus