Vice President Kamala Harris speaking to the news media at a Penzeys Spices store in Pittsburgh on Saturday.
Vice President Kamala Harris preached unity when she took a break from debate prep and visited a spice shop in Pittsburgh on Saturday.
“Look, it’s time to turn the page on the divisiveness,” she told reporters inside Penzeys Spices. “It’s time to bring our country together to chart a new way forward.”
But the brief campaign stop elicited a bitterly divided reaction that underscored how distant the goal of national harmony remains. Penzeys, which is based in Wisconsin and has shops in more than 20 states, is known for pushing a staunchly liberal viewpoint and openly criticizing Republicans.
In addition to an About Us page, the company’s website includes an “About Republicans” page that blasts what it calls “the slow decline” of the Republican Party over the last half century and the “nonsense” the party is promoting.
Penzeys sells a “January 6 Box” of spices, which it calls “a tasty reminder to keep hope alive and vote (and cook),” and its downtown Milwaukee store welcomed delegates to the Republican National Convention in July with a sign in the window that read, “Welcome Future Fake Electors.”
So it’s no surprise that Ms. Harris’s visit to Penzeys left many Republicans and conservative commentators feeling a bit salty, and elicited a torrent of heated comments on the shop’s Yelp page.
Bystanders waiting for Vice President Kamala Harris to exit Penzeys Spicy Store in Pittsburgh on Saturday.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
“Vice President Kamala Harris, she’s hunkering down in Pittsburgh, pushing for unity while visiting a spice shop known for making fun of Republicans,” Rachel Campos-Duffy, a co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend,” said on the program on Sunday. She called Penzeys “the meanest little spice shop in America.”
Pete Hegseth, also a co-host of the show, said, “They chose the comfiest, coziest place she could conceivably go, where all of the owners and the staff are 100 percent libs who hate Trump.”
Yelp temporarily shut down comments on the page for the Penzeys shop in Pittsburgh after it was flooded with comments about Ms. Harris’s visit.
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“This place hates Republicans and nobody who is human should give them any business,” one commentator wrote, leaving a one-star review. “How disgusting!!”
Another defended Penzeys with a five-star review. “It’s a great location with caring staff who are knowledgeable cooks themselves,” the reviewer wrote. “Shockingly, no one has ever asked for political affiliation before I came in!”
Yelp responded by posting an alert that explained why it had intervened. “While we don’t take a stand one way or the other when it comes to this incident,” the message said, “we’ve temporarily disabled the posting of content to this page as we work to investigate whether the content you see here reflects actual consumer experiences rather than the recent events.”
Bill Penzey, the chief executive of Penzeys, who sends frequent email newsletters to customers, celebrated Ms. Harris’s visit and addressed the backlash in a newsletter on Sunday that had the subject line, “Mean Fox! Kind Kamala! Photo!”
“We’ve been at this for some time, but never has the media of the right tried as hard to boycott us or ‘Bud Light’ us as they are trying right now,” Mr. Penzey wrote, alluding to an effort by conservatives to boycott Bud Light last year after a transgender influencer promoted the beer on Instagram. “Lots of angry emails coming my way. Nothing new, just a little more intense than it’s been in a while.”
Indeed, Mr. Penzey, who founded the company in 1986, has not been shy about sharing his unvarnished political views.
After Donald J. Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Penzey wrote in his newsletter that “the open embrace of racism by the Republican Party in this election is now unleashing a wave of ugliness unseen in this country for decades,” according to The New Yorker magazine.
During part of 2019, Penzeys spent nearly $92,000 on Facebook ads supporting the effort to impeach Mr. Trump, making the spice purveyor the second-biggest spender on impeachment-related Facebook ads, behind only Mr. Trump and his campaign, according to data from a communications agency.
Mr. Penzey did not immediately respond to an email on Tuesday, but he has said in past interviews that his political views have not hurt his business. On the “About Republicans” page on the Penzeys website, the company says it does “not hate” Republicans.
“Going forward we would still be glad to have you as customers,” it says, “but we’re done pretending the Republican Party’s embrace of cruelty, racism, Covid lies, climate change denial, and threats to democracy are anything other than the risks they legitimately are.”
Vice President Kamala Harris at a Penzeys Spices store in Pittsburgh on Saturday.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.