Crumb and Get It bakery incident

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"[1] Crumb and Get It bakery, asking owner Chris McMurray if he would host an unscheduled media event, but McMurray politely declined, citing political differences.[2] McMurray said that the exchange was very kind—not heated, hoarse, or ill-mannered—a matter of political difference ("convictions about my faith" and then-President Obama's attitude toward business), with no offense to Biden.[2] McMurray later explained that he "would not like to be used as a photo op for (Obama/Biden's) campaign".[3] Biden's event was held at the nearby River City Grill instead.[2]

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.[2] The coverage led to an outpouring of support and a surge in business the next day[2] that caused it to close down at 1:15pm because it ran out of food.[1] McMurray opened shops in Fredericksburg and Lakeland before later shutting its doors.[4]

McMurray's disagreement stemmed in part from his reaction to Obama's "You didn't build that" remark the previous month in Roanoke.[2] Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan requested that McMurray introduce him at a rally in Roanoke the following week,[3] when McMurray told the crowds "We (small business owners) did build it".[4] Three non-partisan fact-checkers subsequently found Obama's remark to refer to public infrastructure and not to the small businesses themselves.[2]

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"[1] were later contradicted by 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.[5]

The Crumb and Get It incident "re-entered the national conversation" after the 2018 Red Hen restaurant controversy.[6] 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.[6]

The Crumb and Get It incident was among similar incidents that "re-entered the national conversation"[6] 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.[7]

In 2015, a county clerk in Kentucky, Kim Davis, refused on personal religious grounds to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.[8]

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 Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave the restaurant.[4] 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.[4]

• "Fact Check / Politics / Was Joe Biden Refused Service at 'Crumb and Get It' in 2012?". Snopes. June 27, 2018. Archived from the original on January 19, 2022. Retrieved July 8, 2018.