PHILADELPHIA — A Philadelphia Checkers restaurant fired several employees after a Facebook Live showed the workers talking about “unsanitary” acts that include having sex with customers at the location and spitting in food.
The 44-minute video, posted over the weekend, showed employees claiming they had sex with customers at the Checkers restaurant on Stenton Avenue, according to WCAU-TV. Another workers also claimed to make the food without gloves, talked about “washing the floor with burger buns” and threatened to spit in food before handing it over to customers.
The video has since gone viral and angered many people on social media for the lack of respect and unsanitary conditions. The original video had been deleted, but another Facebook user The Vic 2015 had downloaded and reposted it.
The rant caught Checkers’ attention on Facebook. The company posted a comment stating:
Thank you for making us aware of this video. The behavior of these employees does not meet our high standards for food preparation and guest service, and does not represent the thousands of Checkers employees who do an outstanding job every day.
As soon as we became aware of the post, we immediately contacted the franchisee, who proactively closed the restaurant late last night. The employees involved will be terminated, and the restaurant will be fully sanitized and re-inspected before it reopens, and all of the team members will be fully retrained.
As a Checkers guest, your trust is the most important thing to us. We thank you for your support, and we will address all of the issues at this location.
But one of the main employees in the video is speaking out, saying it was all a publicity stunt.
“I be doing little publicity stunts,” former employee Richard Benson told WCAU. “There wasn’t anything going on that I was saying but I was saying it because I knew it would draw attention.”
Benson was the one who initially published the video that he later deleted. He insisted to WCAU that the acts he and the other employees described were never acted upon and that tho “whole thing was a joke.”
“I just want to let people know that that’s not what was going on. Nothing negative went down in that store. Whoever ordered that day, your food was properly cooked, properly made, properly prepared. We didn’t do nothing. We didn’t contaminate nothing. Nothing negative,” Benson said.
Since the video was reposted, it has received more than 500 reactions and 2,700 shares as of Tuesday morning.
