After dealing with a real health safety crisis because of a norovirus infection, Chipotle is now dealing with a fake news crisis caused by known hoax website Empire Herald.
They posted an article some time ago claiming that Chipotle would sell burritos for $1 for a week in an effort to regain public trust. The story opens with a ficticious quote from Chipotle CEO Steve Ells, supposedly to Bloomberg Business News:
Come by your local Chipotle this week and order any burrito for a dollar. As many as you can eat and we guarantee not one person will get sick.
Because the quote is also the description of the story that people get to see when it is shared on social media, many people seem to be sharing it without actually verifying if it is true.
Chipotle Selling $1 Burritos All Week To Regain Public Trust
"Come by your local Chipotle this week and order any burrito for a dollar. As many as you can eat and we guarantee not one person will get sick," Chipotle's CEO and founder Steve Ells told Bloomberg Business News.
If they had checked first they would have noticed a few things:
- The (undated) article mentions that the week of Jan 11th to 17th is '$1 burrito week', so the offer would already be expired even if it was true.
- Empire Herald is a site peddling fake news, for example this story about a morgue worker giving birth to a baby from a corpse, which we debunked here.
- Bloomberg's website has nothing about the story.
Don't be fooled like all these people were:
