Just after 10:00am on Wednesday, August 15, 2012, an advance team from Joe Biden’s campaign entered the three-month old "mom-and-pop" Crumb and Get It bakery, asking owner Chris McMurray if he would host an unscheduled media event, but McMurray politely declined, citing political differences. McMurray said that the exchange was very kind—not heated, hoarse, or ill-mannered—a matter of political difference, with no offense to Biden. McMurray later explained that he "would not like to be used as a photo op for campaign". Biden's event was held at the nearby River Street Grill instead.
Aftermath
A television reporter for WDBJ, Roanoke, Virginia, received a tip about the occurrence, a resultant story being picked up by the Drudge Report and various conservative blogs. The coverage led to an outpouring of support and a surge in business the next day that caused it to close down at 1:15pm because it ran out of food. McMurray opened shops in Fredericksburg and Lakeland before later shutting its doors. McMurray's disagreement stemmed in part from his reaction to Obama's "You didn't build that" remark the previous month in Roanoke. Republican Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan requested that McMurray introduce him at a rally in Roanoke the following week, when McMurray told the crowds "We did build it". Three non-partisan fact-checkers subsequently found Obama's remark to refer topublic infrastructure and not to the small businesses themselves. Reports that Secret Service agents subsequently entered and thanked McMurray "for standing up and saying no" and "bought a whole bunch of cookies and cupcakes" were later contradicted by the a Secret Service spokesman who said the agents were there to thank the shop owners for their trouble and apologize for any inconvenience the advance team may have caused. The Crumb and Get It incident "re-entered the national conversation" after the 2018 Red Hen restaurant controversy. At that time, the owner of an unrelated Pennsylvania bakery of the same name reported being "slammed with messages" concerning the incident in Virginia six years earlier.
Similar incidents
The Crumb and Get It incident was among similar incidents that "re-entered the national conversation" in the wake of the 2018 Red Hen restaurant controversy. In the 2012 Masterpiece Cakeshop incident, a Colorado baker refused to make a customized wedding cake for a gay couple due to the owner's religious opposition to their marriage. In 2015, a county clerk in Kentucky, Kim Davis, refused on personal religious grounds to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. In the June 2018 Red Hen restaurant controversy, a restaurant co-owner in Lexington, Virginia who disapproved of President Trump's administration's policies asked White House Press SecretarySarah Huckabee Sanders to leave the restaurant. Contrasting with the generally positive reaction received by McMurray, after Sanders tweeted about the incident, the restaurant quickly became the object of an online troll campaign, extreme Yelp reviews, and a negative tweet from President Trump himself.
