An employee at a Burger King restaurant apparently thought it would be funny to go online and post a picture of himself standing in bins of lettuce with the caption, “This is the lettuce you eat at Burger King.” The picture attracted a lot of attention and in about 15 minutes, some clever people were able to pinpoint the location of the store in Ohio.
The info was shared with Burger King and now three employees have been fired for their actions.
This is great news as we don’t need these bozos handling our food. There have been other examples (Dominoes Pizza comes to mind) where employees have been shown to be doing inappropriate things to people’s meals.
Burger King, like many restaurants, has a zero-tolerance policy toward these incidents. That’s good but I wonder if it goes far enough. This latest crop of idiots was only caught because they posted the incident online.
To me the BK policy is punitive rather than preventative. Who knows what these employees been doing when a camera hasn’t caught their actions.
Think of it like this: If I make a joke about brining a bomb onto a plane while I’m in an airport, I’m in big trouble with TSA and may never be allowed to fly again. There’s some teeth to the consequences.
Could a similar policy exist for workers who handle food? If you’re caught doing something inappropriate in the kitchen, then the Health Department blacklists you.
Maybe the penalty should extend to the owner. If one of his or her employees is caught standing in a bin of lettuce or sneezing into a meal, the restaurant is slapped with a big fine. The goal is to make bad kitchen behavior unthinkable.
I’m not a fan of additional rules and bureaucracy but I’m also tired to hearing about food service workers (and yes, it is a few bad apples) doing the wrong things. Let’s make sure this problem never happens again instead of waiting for the next time that it occurs.
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