Restaurant, Phone Book Settle After Carcass Removal Screw Up

December 17th, 2012. By AbiK

How well do you think your restaurant business would be doing if your phone book listing was tucked under the “Animal Carcass Removal” section in the local yellow pages?

Well, that’s just what this negligence lawsuit in Montana was about.

According to an AP report, a restaurant—Bar 3 Bar-B-Q—which has locations in Bozeman and Belgrade MT (and its own BBQ sauce, see left), was listed under “Animal Carcass Removal” in the yellow pages there. Now, forget about the simple fact that anyone looking under “Restaurants” would simply not see Bar 3 Bar-B-Q listed—that’s only half the issue. What about the people who actually notice the restaurant listed right along with other dead animal removal services?

That raises a whole bunch of questions not the least of which is…what exactly would a restaurant do with those dead animals? Re-purposed roadkill could, imaginably, help defray increasing food costs and give new meaning to “local beef”—though one can only think it would be a matter of time before something else that’s local—the health department—would have something to say about it.

Clearly, someone messed up and Hunter Lacey, who owns Bar 3 Bar-B-Q, was none too pleased. A late-night Jay Leno crack about it didn’t exactly help either—what was a local beef (pun intended) suddenly became a nationally known joke. It also didn’t help that the listing was not only originally printed in the 2009 phone book (when all this began) but that it was subsequently picked up in other phone directories in 2010 and 2011. Ouch.

So Lacey filed a negligence, defamation and slander lawsuit against the phone book company, Dex Media, Inc. And the two (Dex and Bar 3’s parent company, Big Sky Beverage) have finally settled.

According to AP, Dex had said that the listing was erroneous and that they removed the listed upon its discovery. Terms of the settlement have not been disclosed, but reports indicate that it would include a payment to the restaurant owner.

Tags: Bar 3 Bar-B-Q, Defamation, Negligence, Restaurant Lawsuit, Settlement, slander, yellow pages

This was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2012 at 11:30 am and is filed under Emerging Issues, lawsuits . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.