Boycott Pizza Hut Email A Hoax

These few days, mails arriving into my mailbox includes some catchy forward mails, and one of this alarming email is titled, “FW: Boycott Pizza Hut Malaysia”. I’m publishing this forwarded mail unaltered.

The email claimed that Pizza Hut in Sunway Pyramid is practicing price discrimination based on race and asked people to boycott Pizza Hut. I asked Jeff Ooi about this matter and he shed some lights to me on this matter.

First of all, this email is a hoax. This issue of PizzaHut issue is as aged as 2 years old.

Secondly, the Management of PizzaHut had clarified it over one year ago when rumour mails like this flew across the Internet. Most recently, human rights lawyer had also clarified the facts with he PizzaHut management and obtained official replies from them, twice about this issue.

Please go over to here to read the response by Pizza Hut and here on a second response. I’ll publish the first response by Lawrence Ding, Senior General Manager of Pizza Hut Restaurants Malaysia Berhad below:

As discussed earlier, please allow me to give you a little background to the history of Pizza Hut Malaysia and how we arrived to this point of frenzied allegation in very race sensitive Malaysia.

KFC Holdings Berhad bought over Pizza Hut from Cerebos in Dec 1995. It was then a Quick Service Restaurants concept serving buffets and quick meals. It was operated as a fastfood chain concept then.

Over the years to remain relevant to our customers, Pizza Hut continued our journey of innovation to be a Casual Dining Restaurants Concept.

We have invested significantly since then, to change our image from a Fast Food Chain Concept to a Enhanced Dining Restaurant Chain Concept.

About 2 years ago, we began to roll out the new Pizza Hut restaurant image. The assets, image, etc were elevated. We also made significant changes to the Dine-In menu. It is a very significant change to our business strategy.

To make our investment viable in the long term, we conducted some research on all the Customers Touch Points namely, the Restaurant Assets, the Menu, the Uniform etc.

Thus for about 3 months, we had our docket capture our customers’ group size and race. This was done purely to see who or which segment of the population respond positively or negatively to our menu items. It is also very important for our New Product Development Team to develop menu items that will appeal to our customers.

We have had enough learnings from research and the exercise have stopped long ago.

I really hope, En Harris, that you will help promote the truth and publish this truth on your web, so that this lies will stop circulating….one day.

Your help is greatly appreciated.

Cheers and God Bless.

Lawrence Ding

Go on over to Hadris Ibrahim’s blog for the second response by Pizza Hut.

Now this is bad for people like us who use internet daily and depend on it as our source of news. These new source of news, be it blogs, emails, feeds or whatever you can think of besides the newspaper can be considered as new world media. We depend on these new world media more than the traditional media to get our news updated. Therefore we are easily influenced when somebody goes around spreading rumors or defaming another person.

Now if we continue to spread this hoax again, Pizza Hut will be the victim of the particular party which intend to defame it, and we just helping these black hats to success if we do not stop these misleading information. So please go on over to Haris Ibrahim’s blog to read on this matter and let’s undo the injustice to Pizza Hut because of our ignorance and the perceived wrong cause.

So if you’d perceive the wrong cause or just follow up what the email says and forward it blindly to your friends, please kindly point them to this post and undo the mistake that you have done. I feel bad for Pizza Hut for being a victim this time. Let us clear up Pizza Hut’s name together.