[Writing Prompt] You come up with a scheme based on opening a restaurant that fails, but you can’t help but succeed instead.
S@$t Eaters
“Another three orders of ‘shit on a stick’ and two orders of ‘fecal fries’.”
As the young cashier yelled back into kitchen, Darius muttered what felt like an unending string of curses. In a sense the same string of curses had really started about six months ago when “S@$t Eaters” opened and continuing up until the present moment.
With a quick grab Darius threw six factory made, pre-cooked and frozen balls of breaded beef into the fryer, along with a batch of the cheapest fries he could buy wholesale. Like everything else served at “S@$t Eaters”, this food was utter garbage, often procured at severe discounts from the least popular factory farms and processing plants.
The menu items were specifically entitled to be as unappetizing as possible – the sodas, for instance, were just called “Piss”. You bought different sizes of piss and the only flavor was past expiration date Mountain Dew bought secondhand from several local establishments.
The store itself had once been, long ago, an Italian restaurant, until a grease fire took out the kitchen and the owners abandoned the place. It was deemed suitable as a food business because Darius bribed the local inspector. However Darius changed precisely nothing about the restaurant. It was still the same god awful seats and tables, torn and mildewed. The kitchen would not survive a single health audit, if the municipality had the money to do those anymore. The cooking equipment had never even been cleaned just turned on and put back into service.
There had been a host of poisonings – some e-coli or norovirus. No deaths, just a bunch of widely publicized incidents affirmatively connected to “S@$t Eaters” on social media. That cut the older crowd out, but for some reason young people flocked to the dumpster fire of a restaurant like it was the local McDonalds. Eating at “S@$t Eaters” had become a point of personal and online pride, something to be shared on Instagram or Facebook or lives-streamed directly.
All of this was basically Darius’s worst nightmare. The whole point of the “S@$t Eaters” enterprise was to create the most obvious, catastrophic failure of a business in the history of businesses. A year ago Darius had been part of a remarkable scheme to defraud several thousand investors of approximately 100 million dollars worth of cryptocurrency. He had managed to convert that into fiat using off shore accounts but now the money was trapped abroad. “S@$t Eaters” was supposed to be the first of a series of intentionally failed business ventures, intended to live only briefly, launder about a million dollars, and then collapse in a ball of fire, allowing a taxable deduction on the loss. A tax specialist came up with the scam, a method whereby failed businesses were more effective at laundering money than successful ones, by orders of magnitude – and much faster than a legitimate food business could make money.
Unfortunately, six months later this garbage heap was still up and running. In fact, it was quickly becoming the most popular fast food joint in the region. Darius received multiple requests to open other “S@$t Eaters” every week. Darius meanwhile worked tirelessly to make people hate the place, brazenly violating the health code and coming up with more and more disgusting entrees. But no matter what he did, “S@$t Eaters” just got more popular.
“One Steaming Pile,” the cashier yelled into the kitchen, barely audible over the crowd of customers waiting on line.
Darius cursed again. The “Steaming Pile” was nothing but a basin filled with mass produced chili covered in an unbroken quarter inch of hot nacho cheese product imported from Malayasia. It was the most popular menu item.
As Darius scooped a heap of dogfood quality meat into the pre-used paper bowl the curses kept on flowing.
If You Enjoyed This Story – Or Any Of The Hundreds Of Other Legends From The Multiverse – And Want To Give A Dollar To The Madman Behind The Curtain Who Writes Them All:
Subscribe to the RSS feed or leave a comment anywhere on the r/LFTM subreddit with “!subscribeme” or “subscribeme!”, and you’ll receive a notification whenever a new story or continuation is posted.
READ MORE FLASH FICTION
| ACTION | APOCALYPTIC | DARK | ESTABLISHED UNIVERSE | FANTASY |
| FUNNY MAYBE | HORROR | MISC | WTF IS THIS? | SAD |
| SCIENCE FICTION | SCIENCE FANTASY | TWIST ENDING | RANDOM |
READ LONGER STORIES
| THE DEMON’S CANTOS | INCIDENTAL SUPERHERO |
| BENEATH | THE HUMANITY SAGA |
| THE TRAVELER | I, LYCANTHROPE |