Category: Sights

Eva Dixon’s to get the boot from the Zoo

The Dom­Post reports that Eva Dix­on’s Cafe is being giv­en the old heave-ho from Wel­ling­ton Zoo. The con­tract for the run­ning of the Zoo’s cafe came up last Octo­ber, and, as co-own­er John Heald said…

We were under the impres­sion it would­n’t have been a prob­lem and were wait­ing for the paper­work to come through …

But no! The Zoo weighed up their options, and have decided to go with face­less, char­ac­ter­less cor­por­ate cater­ing out­fit Spot­less.

Says Kar­en Fifield, chief exec­ut­ive of the Zoo…

We wanted to make a com­mer­cial decision which was going to res­ult in value for the zoo.

Giv­en that Eva’s is ‘pre­dom­in­antly fam­ily-run and loc­ally owned’, and Spot­less, well, aren’t (and hardly have a, err, ‘spot­less’ repu­ta­tion with regards to treat­ing their staff well), it might be argued that the Zoo is fly­ing in the face of one of their own stated goals, which is to “gen­er­ate last­ing com­munity sup­port by rais­ing the pro­file of the Zoo and mak­ing the Zoo rel­ev­ant to all Wel­ling­to­ni­ans.” (Admit­tedly, it does ful­fill their goal of increas­ing “…fin­an­cial sus­tain­ab­il­ity by increas­ing rev­en­ue…”).

Whatever the case, if you’d like to vent your opin­ion on this par­tic­u­lar issue to someone who has some sway in the Zoo’s affairs, drop Celia Wade-Brown a line – she’s the WCC Coun­cil­lor in charge of the Zoo Trust.