Tag: zoo

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.