Sales Drop at Wendy's After Finger Found :eek:

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By ANDY RESNIK, Associated Press Writer

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Sales have dropped sharply at Wendy's fast food restaurants in the area of northern California where a woman claimed she found part of a finger in a bowl of chili, but analysts say the company's long-term prognosis should not be affected.



Peter Oakes, a restaurant analyst with Piper Jaffray & Co. in New York, said he doesn't expect Wendy's business to suffer long term from the discovery Tuesday night of a partial finger.


The hamburger chain serves about 6 million meals a day across the country and has a "national reputation for both quality and cleanliness," he said.


"To me the yard stick here is whether the single incident prompts the consumer to lose confidence in the brand. It's understandable to see some kind of knee-jerk reaction," Oakes said.


Franchise owners have informed the company's corporate headquarters in the Columbus suburb of Dublin that business is down, said Denny Lynch, spokesman for Wendy's International Inc. He said he could not release specific sales figures because Wendy's does not own those restaurants.


"It is an isolated incident. However, it is dramatically affecting sales in that market," Lynch said.


Authorities in San Jose, Calif., planned to search a fingerprint database on Friday to try to identify the finger's owner.


Capt. Bob Dixon of the Santa Clara County coroner's office said he did not know when their fingerprint expert might have a match. "Nobody's claimed it yet," he said.


U.S. financial markets were closed Friday for the holiday weekend. The day before, on Thursday, Wendy's shares rose 43 cents, or 1.1 percent, to close at $39.43 on the New York Stock Exchange (news - web sites) — near the high end of their 52-week trading range of $31.74 to $42.12.


Wendy's said the finger did not come from the restaurant's employees. It is also confident company suppliers are not to blame because of product coding that allows the company to trace where a product comes from, the day it was produced, when it was shipped and when it arrived at the restaurant, Lynch said.


However, he acknowledged the process was "not absolutely 100 percent perfect."


Matt Baun, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (news - web sites)'s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said it was doubtful a person working at a federal beef producer would have lost the finger in an accident.


"The production line would have stopped, there would have been immediate need for medical attention and the meat products would be destroyed and not used for food," he said.


A Louisville, Ky., lawyer who has handled similar cases said he doesn't expect Wendy's image to take much of a hit.


Bo Bolus, who has represented plaintiffs over foreign objects found in McDonald's food and defended insurance companies against those claims, said consumers tend to realize that incidents like the one at Wendy's are accidents.


"I haven't found any big institutional problems in the fast-food chains," Bolus said. "I still go to McDonald's with my four boys." <end>



See for yourself : http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=509&ncid=509&e=4&u=/ap/20050325/ap_on_bi_ge/wendy_s_finger

Originally posted by Dunkirk101
Sales Drop at Wendy's After Finger Found :eek:




this is why i rarely if ever eat out. i used to be in the food industry. i know what sometimes happens to the food. but mostly not that bad. it's bad enough that food in the store has so much crap in it.

...and people laugh at me for being a vegetarian and not eating fast food. I've never found any human body parts in MY lunch.

I guess someone losing a finger in a meat-packing accident doesn't sound too far off. I just finished reading The Jungle, and there's one part where Upton Sinclair describes how plant workers would sometimes fall into vats and be made into lard, and usually they wouldn't discover their remains for days...after the lard had already been sold to the public. Fingers may be the least of what's in our fast food...

So what? The food's cooked. As long as it's cooked, and free of anything poisonous, it's perfectly safe. Now, fast food is completely unhealthy, way too greasy, and rather disgusting (more often than not)...though I have been known to chow down with a McDonald's Double Quarter Pounder on rare occasions...

Burger Kings XL Double Bacon & Cheese burger is my choice of selection. I dont normally eat those since Hewlett Packards restaurants are actually pretty good.

I notice though that the first bite feels like a tennis ball going down the throat, really have to swallow a few times to get it down lol.

The best burgers, though, are the following:

1. The ones I cook.
2. El Cap, a local restaurant.
3. Backyard Burger, by far the best fast food I've ever eaten. I ate there when I was visiting family in North Carolina, and damn, they have kickass burgers. There aren't any very close to me; the nearest one is in Orlando, roughly 80 miles away. Bit far for a burger.

Originally posted by sputnik
...and people laugh at me for being a vegetarian and not eating fast food. I've never found any human body parts in MY lunch.

I

BUT it is legal for soo much parts per million of rat feces, rat hair, bugs, and such in canned goods, and fresh veggies on the market.
this is why i am trying to raise as much food for myself as possible and hunt a little. at least i know what is in it, how it was raised, and what was used on it.
gardens, chickens, turkeys, goats, and hunting.

Originally posted by BorgHunter
So what? The food's cooked. As long as it's cooked, and free of anything poisonous, it's perfectly safe.

I wouldn't even be so sure of that :(

Originally posted by sputnik
I wouldn't even be so sure of that :(

there's no guarentee that it is cooked properly in fast food. soo much going through at one time ..............