Chinese supermarket staff filmed eating snails and throwing shells back for sale
She’s sacked but footage of ‘disgusting’ incident raises concerns among shoppers
A Chinese supermarket worker has been fired for eating cooked snails and throwing the shells back into the pile of food for sale, an online news portal reported.
The woman was seen picking snails out of the skillet and eating them at a branch of Century Mart in Yongzhou city, Hunan province, according to video footage published by Thepaper.cn.
The incident, which took place on Monday, was captured by a member of the public, who uploaded the footage onto Weibo.
“This is so disgusting, if this person has some transmittable disease then it would be disastrous,” one web user said.
The supermarket responded with a statement the following day, saying that the woman in question had been dismissed and the cooked snails in the skillet had been thrown away.
“We would like to express our sincere apologies ... We will give more attention to the management and hygiene [of the store] from now on,” the notice read.
But the note from the store’s cooked foods section risked a further backlash by signing off with the warning: “We reserve the right to pursue legal action regarding any malicious hyping up of the incident.”