Boston Pizza charged with over-serving booze in fatal pedestrian death

Three workers at Boston Pizza have been charged due to selling liquor to an intoxicated person. The intoxicated man was then later killed crossing the road. The 36 year-old unidentified man died in the Oshawa hospital after being hit at around 1am.  Kirandeep Khaira, Harinder Brar and Alicia Bruneau along with the Boston Pizza franchise have been charged under the Provincial liquor license act after allegedly serving alcohol to an already intoxicated person. The Oshawa located Boston Pizza released a statement expressing their devastation and clarified that they were doing their best to cooperate with the police in the investigation. If the alleged victims are convicted they can face fines up to $100,000 per person or 1 year in jail while the restaurant can face $250,000 in fines.

This particular crisis is an interesting one seeing as how the man was killed after having left the premise of the restaurant. According to Ontario law, the individual serving alcohol is given the responsibility of ensuring that customers do not reach a certain level of intoxication. It is not only the responsibility of the server but of the licensed establishment as well to ensure that the individual arrives home safely. Although the crisis did not occur at the licensed establishment, Boston Pizza is still liable since they did not take the precautionary measures to ensure customer safety.  This meso level crisis will certainly tarnish the franchises’ reputation, as customers will now be worried about drinking while going to the restaurant. Boston Pizza needs to release a statement announcing their turn around strategy that will ensure this crisis will never occur again. They also need to express their feelings of remorse and apologize in order to let the public get a sense of their sincerity.

This management/employee misconduct type crisis was not an event that was predictable but it should have been a crisis that Boston Pizza anticipated and was prepared for. When you are an establishment that handles alcohol it is your responsibility to take care of the customers regardless of what events can arise. Since this crisis is a more emotional one because it involves the death of an individual, audiences will show more constraints to Boston Pizza’s crisis communication. The audience will be mistrusting, hostile, upset etc. but it is Boston Pizza’s duty to ensure that they announce that they know they made a mistake but will do everything in their power to show that they have learned from their mistake so this never happens again.

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/03/07/boston_pizza_charged_with_overserving_booze_in_fatal_pedestrian_death.html