Elite Dry Cleaners under fire again as students claim intimidation
Elite Dry Cleaners of New Inn Hall Street has come under fire again this week after a student made a complaint of mistreatment to police following an incident in the shop. The allegations come only a week after Pembroke finalist Michael Ramyar successfully sued the shop for ruining a suit he had taken in to be cleaned. The fresh allegations come from a first year Oriental Studies student at St Anne’s.
The student, who does not wish to be named, had an encounter at the shop in which she and two friends were allegedly locked in the shop and threatened by the owner. Describing the incident to The Oxford Student, she said: “I took a pair of trousers in to get a small hole mended, and when I got them back, three days after they were due, they had been mended with a massive line of bright white thread.
“I called them up and they told me to come in and discuss it but when I did I spoke to the seamstress and just couldn’t get a word in edgeways. She was rude, obnoxious and unhelpful, both to me and to another girl who intervened to say that they should give me my money back. In the end I just left.” The student returned a few days later with two friends, a law student and a PPPist, also from St Anne’s, to demand her money back.
The student maintains: “I was perfectly polite, but the woman gradually got more and more heated, and in the end started to say that I had done the sewing myself, which was obviously ridiculous and she’d already been talking as if she’d done it. “She threatened to call the police, and we said that was fine, but in the end she called her husband.” The student alleges: “He was threatening from the moment he got there.
He ranted at us for about ten minutes, before saying that it was private property and ordering us off the premises, but was blocking the door so we couldn’t get out.” According to the student’s account, the man then shouted at his wife to bring the key, and locked the door with the girls inside, whilst continuing to shout at them and make threatening gestures.
The student said she was terrified and her two friends agreed, with one of them saying: “He was literally the biggest man I’ve ever seen; well over six feet and about 17 stone, we were frozen, scared, literally with our backs to the wall” The other added, “I honestly thought he might hit us."
The girls’ account culminates when they say that after the man unlocked the door and allowed them to leave, he slammed the door in their backs with sufficient force to propel the last girl forward, into the others. They also allege he referred to them as “f**king Oxford students” as they left. The girls then called the police, who took statements and arranged times for a further interview.
The manager of Elite Dry Cleaners was unavailable for comment but a worker who had witnessed the incident described it, saying the girl was rude on her first visit, making a hand gesture at the manager as she left �" an allegation she admits, but says she was provoked by the verbal abuse she received.
When questioned by The Oxford Student, he ascribed the locking of the shop to the girls putting off other customers, and denied that the manager was abusive, saying: “He was only asking them why they were rude, why they made rude gestures”. The student has not yet decided whether to take the matter further, saying she will discuss it with the police first, although she commented, “they've been quite unreliable so far."
2nd Jun 2005