Day 100 - 09 Mar 95 - Page 12
1
2 Q. No?
3 A. No, foreign objects are the vast majority of the
4 complaints that we get.
5
6 MR. JUSTICE BELL: All this -- may I just pause -- depends,
7 first of all, upon the customer seeing fit to complain?
8 A. That is right, yes.
9
10 Q. Then it depends upon the person to whom they complain
11 seeing fit to pass it down the line?
12 A. That is right. If the complaint is handled in a
13 professional manner in the restaurant, we should still get
14 to hear about it by way of a reporting system, but it would
15 say this complaint was handled in the restaurant and -----
16
17 Q. But if someone walked back to the counter in a perfectly
18 friendly manner and says: "I think this is a bit
19 under-cooked", and maybe in a typical English
20 under-statement if they do so, and a cheerful crew member
21 says: "Oops, sorry about that", and gives them
22 another ---
23 A. We would not get to hear about that.
24
25 Q. -- human nature being what it is, that might well be the
26 end of that?
27 A. That is true, yes.
28
29 Q. Then you would not know about it; it would not go into any
30 kind of record count or anything else?
31 A. The official line is that any such complaint should be
32 reported, but I suspect you are right. In a number of
33 instances, if it is successfully handled at the store, then
34 we would not get to find out about it.
35
36 MS. STEEL: You also get custom complaints of food poisoning?
37 A. There are occasional complaints of food poisoning, yes.
38
39 Q. Those complaints are all fully investigated?
40 A. Yes, if we get -- there are two different types,
41 perhaps I will take them separately, where a customer will
42 say: "I have food poisoning" and there is no evidence to
43 the fact that she actually or he or she actually did have
44 food poisoning, or that it was McDonald's food that was
45 responsible for that. Those would be reported through and
46 they are logged on the computer. Obviously, the customer
47 is responded to, but we look at the reports -- sorry, we
48 look at the reports drawn off the computer to see if there
49 is any trend.
50
51 For instance, if we had three complaints from the same
52 restaurant on the same day, then we would have to
53 investigate that and feel that there was a problem there,
54 but I have never been aware of a case where that has
55 happened. They are all individual people that, quite
56 possibly, have had food poisoning and have eaten in
57 McDonald's restaurants before that and assumed that it is
58 McDonald's. That is one instance where there is no actual
59 proof.
60
