Last time I drove by my Taco Bell, it looked pretty empty. How much money has Taco Bell lost so far during this e. coli crisis?
I would bet that:
According to their lawyers who are preparing the lawsuit against the supplier of the contaminated lettuce, massive amounts.
According to their reports to stockholders, it’s just a temporary, minor loss of revenue.
What is stupid about the public avoiding Taco Bell is that the outbreak was due to lettuce that Taco Bell BUYS, and could have easily happened to any restaurant that bought that same lettuce. It was a fluke and has nothing to do with Taco Bell itself. It’s like avoiding a store because lightning once struck the building.
I’ll tell you one thing, they’re gonna be losing my money if those bastards at the drive-thru don’t stop bogarting the goddamn sauce packets! One packet per burrito, bitches, it ain’t that much to ask for!
Amen brother. If I get 4 tacos, I want at least 4 fire sauce packets. Two ain’t cutting it Jack.
And now it’s Olive Garden. As with a lot of things, it seems to me the safest time to eat at any restaurant chain is immediately after they’ve had an incident like this, since that’s exactly when they are going to be the most paranoid about hygiene!
No, it’s not stupid.
I don’t think it’s a fluke. Somehow all the other chains in town managed to NOT feed customers contaminated lettuce. Either they pay more to buy from a better supplier, or are more careful in how they handle their ingredients, or both. Avoiding the chains that sold contaminated products, and giving my business to the ones without problems, is about the only thing I can do to reduce the chances of such contaminated food.
Lightning strikes are essentially random; contaminated food is not – it seems to be much more common at some chains than others. (Remember Jack in the Box, anyone?) While with McDonalds (regardless of the healthfulness of their menu), I haven’t heard of any incident of contaminated meat at McDonalds since 1991, 15 years ago. So all I can conclude is that they are more careful about this.
Also, I would indeed tend to avoid a store so careless that they don’t install lightning rods on their building.
Well, I ate at Taco Bell tonight. They have my $4.31. Hopefully it will not cost me my life.
I thought properly washing the lettuce would have removed the bacteria? Or does the supplier sell pre-washed lettuce?
I can’t seem to convince them to stop giving me sauce packets. Much as I enjoy a good cheap burrito, I can’t stand their sauce! They ask me if I want some, I say no, I get 2-3 packets.
Maybe there’s a holdup inside and they’re trying to tell me in some code, I don’t know…
If its anything like my experience with other FF places, its already washed and shredded, just open the bag and use.
Food poisoning pathogens cannot reliably be removed by washing, particularly on something like lettuce that cannot be scrubbed.
It may genuinely be the case that there was nothing Taco Bell could have done to prevent the outbreak - if, for example, the failure occurred in a prior part of the supply chain and there was no reason to suspect it when the produce was supplied.
I see. So you have **Otto ** and I’s extra sauce packets then. Kindly hand them over. 
I think that a lot of people probably do remember Jack in the Box, especially the ones who live near one of its 2,080 current operating locations in nine western states. (Were you implying that food contamination problems drove it out of business?)
I don’t think he was implying that they’d gone out of business, but pointing out that for Jack In The Box it wasn’t an incident that involved a single, brief period of time like with Taco Bell right now, but rather reports kept repeatedly cropping up over a larger span of time. Problems at Jack’s became endemic in our culture, and it took a while for them to recover. If Taco Bell can limit this incident to just the here and now, then in 15 years people won’t be asking, “remember Taco Bell?”
Hell, I ate Taco Bell hoping to get some e.coli. I could really stand to lose 15-20 lbs, and I’m healthy enough that it probably wouldn’t kill me. The place was pretty empty though…