>>>Catering at an event mostly is NOT retail like selling food in a shop but usually handled by special contract as well. When you state: "I can make it unbearable" you exercise your own terms, but you do it in a PC way. Sorry, the shop owner is [more honest|too dumb to avoid that way|both], but the wish to avoid contract is the same, even if for different personal grounds.
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>>So you agree he simply should could have avoided it? Just making the contract the right way? Don't tell me you can not make a catering offer so that the customer will not take it out of the hip. Some moon prices and it's done. A simply I-need-to-check-my-time table - No, thank you, beg your pardon. That's general behaviour for wrong customers anyway? But no, he was in need to make a statement. So it was intended.
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>He should have avoided it - but if you follow Kevins lead, that the statement was lured out of him by a reporter ? Not all are mentally agile and perhaps the reporter asked dozens of shop owners until he received the one answer very probable to create enough hoopla to get his own name printed often enough.

The folks around here have a bad word for the press ... But it's very hard not to use it. I had my problems with the press, citing out of context and the like ages ago, I know how the local press is manipulating.
Twice as idiotic to talk such stuff to the press. The (western) audience is teached to believe in the press .....