The issue of quality is one that has dominated discussion in American business in recent years. Quality circles, quality plans, total quality management and similar topics have become popular topics for articles in scholarly and popular magazines. For most companies, poor quality in their products mean that their profits suffer, and their customers may endure some inconvenience, or even financial losses. In the food industry, poor quality can lead to sickness, or even death. This is the situation that confronted one of the nation's largest fast-food operators, Jack In The Box in 1993 when four customers died and hundreds of others suffered ill health effects from an outbreak of E. coli after eating contaminated hamburger at the restaurants. Since that time, Jack In The Box, which is owned by Foodmaker, Inc., has tried to recover from the disaster, but its methods have been severely questioned by some observers. This research examines the outbreak and its aftermath, particularly with regard to two primary stakeholders, victims of E. coli and franchisees.
Escherichia coli lives in the bowels of cattle where it is typically not a danger to human consumers. On occasion, however, such as when intestines are ruptured or inadvertently cut during the butchering process, E. coli can spill out of the intestines and mix with the ground meat that is being processed. This is the theory as to how the bacterium migrated to the meat that was eventually sent to Jack In The Box restaurants in Washington state in January 1993 ("Killer Hamburgers," 1993, p. 27). Cooking the meat at high temperatures can eliminate the danger of E. coli, but this practice has the adverse effect of requiring additional time (reducing the level of customer service) and also of increasing other costs. By the end of the episode, which lasted less than a month, four children had died (children and the elderly are particularly vulnerable to the bacterium) and numerou...