Eating out at the mall

I'm a mystery shopper. The details of mystery shopping are left for another post, but I mention it because last year I was assigned a shop to a fast food venue at the mall. The franchise hired mystery shoppers like myself to do a food safety inspection for them. The checklist was long. The visit lasted over 2 hours and I took dozens of pictures. The report was also confidential so I won't mention the name of the business here.

Sadly, I found lots of violations.

When I was at the mall recently, I walked past that same 'store'. From what I could see in the public areas (during the shop I was allowed in the back), they hadn't done a thing to improve. When I got home I looked up the 'store' on the Central District Health website to see how their safety inspecitons had been going.

I didn't find one.

I called CDH and was told that the establishment was considered 'low risk' so it wasn't inspected. However, the person I talked to took a report and said the inspector responsible for all the food stores at the mall would be notified. The inspector called me back, asked a few questions and basically implied I was blowing this out of porportion.

We'll see.

In the meantime, I am posting here to remind everyone to be really careful. If you don't like how someone is handling your food, cancel your order and walk away. If they are committing violations in front of you, imagine the level of violations that might be occurring out of your view.

Fortunately, I never have eaten at that 'store' I inspected and, of course, I never will. I shudder to think what some places I have eaten at have been doing, though.