4Chan Outs Burger King Employee Who Put His Feet in Lettuce | Hacker News Reader

4Chan Outs Burger King Employee Who Put His Feet in Lettuce

mashable.com

54 pointsMarlonPro35 comments

I wish Burger King would sue the person for tarnishing their brand, or something. I feel like violating people's food should engender more serious consequences than the loss of a minimum wage job.

Well – that's the problem with service related jobs. Customer contact and production are so close together that production of your product becomes very distributed/de-centralized. As chains like this compete on price and have grown quite large, they are forced/decide to pay their workers low wages. Low wage workers have less concern, loyalty and often less insight into the ramifications of their choices.

The last claim is predicated on the idea that many low-wage/fast food jobs are held by teenagers who, biologically/neurologically are not wired to consider longer-term consequences. I'll find a cite if needed.

So, I'd ask, how responsible is BK for developing a business model that puts low-wage workers front and center as their primary point of production and primary point of contact with consumers?

Lastly, if BK did bring suit, what do you think they'd be able to recover? At best, garnishing minimum wages – if the person had better financial reserves or means, they'd likely not be working production at BK.

> if BK did bring suit, what do you think they'd be able to recover?

The lawsuit would be punitive, not for profit.

And it wouldn't hurt their PR to assure people that the safe handling of their food is taken seriously.

My point remains the same. There's no value in impoverishing the already nearly impoverished.

The rapid firing of the employee did a lot to keep BK's reputation...or at least made it no worse. Indeed, the morning manager's instant decision to fire the person is a clear signal.

Suing him would probably end up looking bad for BK – certainly worse than the incident was.

I disagree. The value is in demonstrating actions have consequences. This guy decided upon himself to sabotage his employer in order to destroy hard fought good-will. That goodwill is very valuable, and this minimum wage punk decided to destroy some of it. He should be held responsible for that goodwill he destroyed, and simply losing his job does not do anything for the damage caused.

I think firing the guy and leaving it at that is the optimal thing for BK to do. Let's agree that it probably won't be cost effective to garnish the guy's wages, in terms of legal costs to take him to court, the potential future income he'll have, etc. On BK's side, there's a lot of risk of negative publicity involved with taking him to court. I don't think being fired is being let off easy - surely this stunt will make it at least more difficult to be hired at another fast-food place.

I don't see a strong case for tarnishing the brand, but who knows. I was thinking that BK has a record of all card-paying customers from the time of the incident who may have eaten the lettuce. The employee will be lucky if he doesn't get a mound of lawsuits for food poisoning or emotional distress over potential food poisoning. I've read that tampering with food is a federal offense with a max penalty of 20 years in prison.

Edit: looks like it varies from state-to-state and the federal act is harder to prosecute for. Here's a decent write-up: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20... Since he's in Ohio it'll probably be a misdemeanor.

Two problems:

1) Suing him would only further tarnish their brand, as more people would learn about it.

2) Sue him for what? Buddy's unemployed and his last job was at BK. I'd be surprised if he had more than $100 to his name.

I agree that violating people's food should be treated very harshly.

I have to wonder though—in this economy, if you're working a minimum-wage job, losing it must be pretty damned harsh, since there are so many people ready to step up to that job.

Actually, lettuce-stepping Burger King employee was fired thanks to 4chan

And the employee was fired within a matter of ~1/2 day? (Not 60 seconds) :P

What are you saying, Mashable is playing fast and loose with journalistic standards? Well I never.

ok, ok so most of the various bits are not quite accurate but did you notice something good happened because of 4chan!

Kidding aside, its an interesting taste of the life kids are growing up into.

They've been doing good things for a while, if I recall correctly; it's just that they're associated more to all the bad things that they do.

I avoid the website not because of the anonymity or any of their good activities, it's because of the terrible reputation very small sections of their website have.

So you know the reputation is inaccurate (or at least unrepresentative), but you avoid the site anyway?

I do not actively partake. That is correct. I do not look down on those that go to the website; but I don't want to have to explain to someone that "yes, I go to 4chan, and they're not as bad as everyone says! They even help people!" especially for something that isn't a huge part of my life.

They didn't specify what was the start of the 60 s interval :) Perhaps they meant 60 seconds after he got to work :)

According to what I've read, it was thanks to Anonymous

http://www.dailydot.com/news/anonymous-4chan-burger-king-let...

I think everyone missed the point: the lettuce clearly is as rigid as cardboard.

So assuming I can mock up a convincing picture, I can get any arbitrary fast food employee fired by uploading a picture with forged exif data to 4chan?

Do you really think the management at that Burger King are that stupid? Put yourself in their position. Say you get this picture. First you don't take it seriously then you look at it and recognize the employee as the lady at the BK in question did. Then you figure out who was working at the time, get a look at the lettuce containers (do they match the picture?) So on and so forth. It isn't too hard to put the whole scenario together and tell if it is real or not.

I was thinking that it would be funny if it was actually a prank played on them by the McDonalds across the street.

Actually, three people were fired: http://www.cleveland.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/lettuce-p...

What is this, Reddit?

Today has made me very worried for Hacker News. The front page of HN feels like a mirror of Reddit's.

This doesn't solve the problem.

If food safety is their top priority, why did this happen?

Because BK doesn't have a mind control device that prevents their employees from being assholes.

If food safety was prioritized above profit they could afford to hire employees that aren't idiot assholes.

Probably not. A typical fast food restaurant generating several million in sales does mid-six-figures operating profit, with payroll one of the top expenses. Sure, any fast food restaurant could dial up payroll as a % of sales, but not so much that they'd be moving to a different class of employee.

Moreover, the most successful (ie, profitable) fast food restaurants are successful in part because they keep payroll constrained by (a) employing lots of part-time labor and (b) having staffing be elastic with demand. The best workers aren't clamoring to take part-time jobs.

So I think this is one of those sentiments that sounds good on a message board but has no real bearing on reality. But: I welcome a counterargument; I'm no expert, nor would I ever consider franchising a fast food restaurant.

Because $150K+ employees of Google/Microsoft/Facebook/Apple/etc have never been caught being dicknozzles...

Hiring is a probability function. You can optimize it all you want, but sooner or later a complete asshole is going to get through.

The failure of a single employee is not indicative of how well their hiring functions. To make the conclusions you are making, we'd need to know the incidence rate of things like this, but we don't.

There are plenty of better restaurants than Burger King, and at most of them a thing like this would never happen.

Burger King is prioritizing their profit over food safety, but so are the people who eat there. Is anybody really surprised there's food tampering at a fast food restaurant?

People who eat fast food get what they pay for.

There are plenty of restaurants out there like that. If food safety is your concern, perhaps don't eat at low-end fast food places.

Are you kidding me? You can't stop the people who have access to the food from tampering with the food. You just have to trust that they won't be irresponsible with your product. If you catch them doing unsavory stuff with the items served to customers you let them go, that simple.

<3 internet vigilantes

You can only get honest opinions on politics on anonymous, unmoderated forums. /pol/ is a cesspool, but it's real.

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