All Art McCloskey wanted was a Blizzard.
After some grocery shopping April 9, his wife asked to stop at Maricopa’s Dairy Queen for a sweet treat. “Why not,” he thought.
The couple from Sorrento each got “these big, monster” Blizzards, ate a portion and stashed the rest in the freezer for a snack later.
On Sunday, McCloskey decided it was time to eat the rest of his dessert.
“It had a lot of good candy chunks in it with the Butterfingers and Heath bar, so it was kind of crunchy,” McCloskey told InMaricopa today. “I was on my last couple bites of candy and in my mouth comes this damn thing. I thought, ‘What the heck is that?’”
It turned out to be a quarter inch-long steel screw.
“I took it out, looked at it and it [looked like] a screw that came off a machine or something,” he said.
McCloskey would know. He spent more than 25 years working in restaurants and a good chunk of that time was spent disassembling and cleaning kitchen appliances.
That’s why, when he returned to the Dairy Queen at Maricopa Road and Garvey Avenue, he was hoping for a little validation and some kind of fix.
Instead, the manager simply told him the screw didn’t come from their restaurant and three calls to the corporate office in Minnesota went unanswered.
There’s a rock in my food
McCloskey is not the only city dweller who found something weird and hard in his fast food recently. The same went for Darren H., a Glennwilde resident.
While chowing down on a double ButterBurger Cheese from the Culver’s on John Wayne Parkway yesterday, Darren also found something weird in his meal: a rock.
“Now I have a chipped tooth,” he shared on the Nextdoor app.
In a photo, Darren held an M&M-sized pebble in his fingers with his partially eaten burger in the background.
Darren didn’t respond to an interview request today, but he did leave a one-star Yelp review for the restaurant.
“Just chipped my tooth from a rock that was inside my burger today,” he wrote. “Thanks for the upcoming dentist bill.”
While it’s unclear if he took the issue to management or contacted the corporate office, an account labeled “Team Member Culver’s” responded to his review today.
“We’re truly sorry to hear about your experience, Darren. We take your feedback seriously and would like to learn more about this incident,” they wrote, inviting him to share details on their customer service website.
What to do
Dairy Queen and Culver’s did not immediately respond to requests for comment. One Maricopa lawyer said both customers took the right first steps.
“I would recommend if someone were to find something in their food that doesn’t belong there, immediately stop eating. Take pictures, save the object and the food if you can,” said Miss-Ashley Kendrick, attorney for Alpha Omega Law Offices on Smith-Enke Road.
Gathering evidence like that could be used to help prove the customer’s experience and even be used for a further investigation or to run tests if needed.
If you were injured like Darren, see a doctor or dentist as soon as you can.
The second step Kendrick suggested is notifying the restaurant and the corporate office.
“Let them know about your experience and what you found. It could not only prevent other people from finding foreign objects in their food, but also it’s possible other food could have been contaminated,” she said.
But if you don’t hear from the corporate office?
“Hire an attorney to see what your options are,” Kendrick said. “Large companies like these have a lot of attorneys who want to protect the company, so it’s important to have someone on your side.”
While Darren and McCloskey said they didn’t intend to pursue any legal action, they simply wanted acknowledgement that their food wasn’t up to snuff.
“That Dairy Queen has always been good, and the Blizzard itself was delicious, except for the screw part,” McCloskey said. “I don’t want to sue, and I don’t want any money. Just find out where that screw came from and fix the problem.”
