wcbstv.com - KFC Rats Still Talk Of Greenwich Village--municipal government (in)action!
The Health Department had cited this dump numerous times for live rats all over the place but left it open. KFC/Taco Bell (remember the Taco Bell e. coli outbreak?) obviously knew or should have known the place was a rat carnival. Now that the local TV station has filmed and broadcast the rodent festivities, and the video is all over the world, the city and the mega-corporation and the New York restaurant industry flacks are telling us how high their standards are. Right. Scroll down to the bottom and see what an ex-employee had to say:

Marcus Bonner said he used to work at this chain and would often see rodents coming inside. "That's where the rats come from, there's a hole in the back where the garbage is," Bonner said. "There's a hole about three-to-four inches wide. So easy they just walk through. They don't have to squeeze through. "I quit because it was nasty. They don't use gloves to make the food. They use the same grease day after day after day. At night, the manager told me to put the chairs up. We don't sweep; we don't mop. So that's what the rats are eating off, the stuff that's left on the floors."


To me, the moral of the story is that sometimes an industry works out a cozy relationship with government that allows the industry to, shall we say, underperform. The public doesn't know how bad things are until something really awful happens and the media finds out about it. Until then, it is business as usual. And if somebody starts asking for more regulation of the industry, in this case restaurants, the industry will swear up and down that this time they have really, really, learned their lesson, and they can handle the whole thing internally.