Two teenagers are out of a job and a national fast-food company has spent time putting out a public relations fire.
Raising Cane’s, located on N. Ambassador Drive in southern Platte County, became the focus not only locally but nationally when a viral video spread showing an employee using her forearm to stir the tea.
What started out with a few thousands views from the Snapchat video posted on Facebook jumped from 285,000 on Wednesday, June 20 to more than 750,000 the next day after a local TV station did a story on the incident.
Raising Cane’s headquarters became aware of the incident on Tuesday and issued the following statement to The Citizen when asked to comment on the situation.
“At Raising Cane’s, we take pride in what we do and work very hard to train our 19,000+ crew members to uphold the highest standards, which our customers have come to expect from us,” president and COO AJ Kumaran said in a press release. “After reviewing the video of the isolated incident at the Tiffany Springs Restaurant, we are incredibly disappointed by the actions of these crew members. We take the safety and quality of our food very seriously, and we will not tolerate any actions that compromise these standards. As soon as we were made aware of the incident, we took immediate action, including launching an investigation, terminating the crew members and contacting local authorities to support their review of the incident. This is not who we are as a company, and we hold ourselves to a higher expectation. Moving forward, we will work to ensure additional training for all crew members to reinforce how we expect our team to embody Cane’s values in everything we do.”
The video showed a female employee stirring the tea, while another female employee was filming it and both could be heard laughing. The employee that was stirring the tea with her forearm then poured the tea in the dispenser.
The first video caption said ‘don’t drink tea from Cane’s’ and the second said ‘she’s tryflin (sic) cause we don’t care no more.’