News of the Perfectly Acceptable: Sbarro Files for Bankruptcy
Fast food pizza/pasta/indigestion chain Sbarro Inc. is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the news of which has inspired cries of “meh,” the world over.
Bankruptcy proceedings started this week and were announced on April 1st, prompting one lone, greasy undergraduate to cross his fingers and pray it was all an April Fool’s joke, because Sbarro is the only place between him and his C++ tutorial across campus where he can get a Calzone hard and crusty enough not to leak out onto his Wil Wheaton for President t-shirt as he hurriedly scuttles to class. Nobody else assumed it to be a prank, because everybody else knows Sbarro sucks huge, marinara-flavored balls.
I asked a former employee of the “food” establishment, who requested not to be named as he or she may or may not have jacked off and/or urinated in what could have been but may not have been either a vat of alfredo sauce or uncooked breadstick dough, how s/he felt about Sbarro’s bankruptcy, and also why there was always a pool of water at the bottom of my dish of spaghetti.
“I dunno, I don’t really care I guess. Sbarro put me off pizza for the rest of my life. A shirtless woman could literally hand me a gold-encrusted truffle-topped pizza with ten million dollars on top of it and I’d probably barf on her. I’m serious. Once, my manager suggested I take home a box of uneaten pizza at the end of the day and I projectile vomited on him, right there. I offered to clean it up, but he said ‘Why bother?’”
I inquired again about the watery spaghetti, because I’ve had nary a visit to Sbarro that didn’t end in a pool of water at the bottom of my dish, a white-hot anger flashing in front of my eyes, and me waking up the next morning dazed, confused, and covered in someone else’s blood.
“Oh, that? Well we store the cooked spaghetti in a vat of warm water to keep it all wiggly and slippery and sad looking, like a troupe of melancholic eels. We scoop it out and give it a good shake before serving it, but usually we don’t shake it quite enough. One is great, two is fine, three at most, but four and you’re just playing with it. Anyway, you usually end up getting about 40% noodles, 60% water.”
I then punched him/her square in the face, on behalf of college students everywhere who had to sit and stare with abject horror at the choice between a Sbarro and a Panda Express in the student union.
News of Sbarro’s financial troubles might have made more prominent headlines if Americans were not still collectively retching from the last time we ate there.