In this free-for-all-Friday Trent touches base with listeners and shares a story about the worst grocery store you could ever visit.
Trent Horn (00:00):
It is Free For All Friday. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. It’s been a while. It’s been a minute. I don’t know what happened. I’ve just had a lot going on. I feel like I have not done a traditional free for all Friday in a bit. I was in a little bit of a slump. I’m not sure these things just happen. I think I’ve had a lot of personal things going on and a lot of things also at work going on. And I think that Free For All Friday took the brunt of it a little bit. I mean, there’s still a lot of great content I like sharing with you guys here on Friday. Maybe other interviews that I’ve done that I think you all would benefit from. But I feel like, I don’t know, something in my heart. I wasn’t totally feeling it, but I think it’s coming back around.
(00:39):
I’m doing a little bit more to get refreshed, to get refocused spiritually, emotionally, physically also. I’m going to be honest with you though. I was struggling a little bit thinking about what to do with Free For All Friday. I mean, I must have done over 300 of these episodes, at least over 250, probably over 300 now. We’ve done over a thousand episodes of the show. And originally Free For All Friday just began because Council of Trent was an audio podcast. And so I saw it as a way, oh, people who aren’t Catholic might tune in and listen to the Free For All Friday and then listen to the main episodes and help people out. And also, I got a lot of fun stuff to talk about. But now it is really strange how Council of Trent has transitioned over the last eight years into being … The brunt of it is being a video essay channel.
(01:30):
And we’ve reached a lot of people on YouTube. We get about three million views a month now. And so I’m so blessed to see how God has used it to help so many people. And to be frank, I don’t like being on the internet a ton. I would even encourage people sometimes to listen to the podcast episodes more than watching YouTube, because maybe it can just keep you off the internet when you don’t want to be there, when you don’t need to be there. So I’ve thought about it. I’m like, “Oh, should I keep doing free for all Friday? Should I just let it go? ” I can’t make it a part of the YouTube channel because those videos would totally collapse. You all who are faithful podcast listeners, you’re much more faithful than people on YouTube. YouTube, it’s hard to wrangle people in. They just click whatever the algorithm gives them.
(02:13):
If you subscribe on a podcast, tend to be a faithful listener. And I appreciate. Some of you have been listening for like eight years on podcasts. Thank you for your support. I really appreciate it. If you want to help us grow more even, go to trendwormpodcast.com, come a subscriber there. That’s always helpful. But I’ve decided, no, I want to keep doing Free For All Friday. It might not be a big glamorous production, but it’s fun. I can just talk to you guys. I mean, this is how it was like mid 2010s, podcasts. Turn on the microphone. Just talk to people. It doesn’t have to be all polished and all perfect. I just want to talk to you guys about things that I find weird and interesting. And even sharing other stuff in Council of Trent that I think you would benefit from. So all right, so we’ve touched base about Free For All Friday.
(02:57):
I want to keep doing this. There’s all kinds of fun stuff to talk about. Today, what I want to talk about is the Mexia supermarket incident. This has happened in 1999 in Fort Worth, which is where I live now. And it was about a supermarket that turned into a biohazard because of a comedy of errors. So here’s the article. Let me read this to you. So the Mexia supermarket incident was a bizarre and disturbing event in 1999 when a grocery store in Fort Worth was abandoned with all of its food still inside, leading to one of the most extreme urban biohazard situations in recent history, at least here in the US, I would say. So the supermarket, it opened in the late 1990s, but it ran into financial trouble. Owned by Advanced Investment Corp, the business accumulated significant debt. Over a million dollars in debt.
(03:46):
And it’s hard because people think grocery stores, oh, grocery store. They’re gouging people. Mom, Donnie in New York wants to do free grocery stores. Grocery stores, their profit margin is really, really thin. Only about one to 2% on the goods they sell. They can’t lower prices really anymore. They can’t raise prices anymore because there’s a grocery store down the street who will sell it at a lower price. So the price in the grocery store is really as low as they can get it to keep their overhead. How they make money is by volume. So a grocery store makes money because yeah, they only make a tiny bit on every purchase, but there’s tens of thousands of purchases, hundreds of thousands of purchases every, not every day, but every week. Some big grocery stores maybe, yeah, but not everyone makes it. So by mid 1999, the owners began defaulting on loans.
(04:30):
Sometime between July and August of that year, the store abruptly closed its doors. Shortly afterward, the company filed for chapter seven bankruptcy. What made this case unusual and infamous was what happened next. Instead of clearing out inventory, donating food or even disposing of perishables, the store was simply locked up and abandoned. I think there was a error. People were communicating about who was responsible, who’s the trustee, who’s now owning the store, who has ownership over it now that the owners have declared bankruptcy and have abandoned it. They think they don’t have to do anything with the store, but the people who it was transferred over to thought it wasn’t their responsibility either. So nobody thinks it’s their responsibility to empty the store of its inventory. They just lock up the store. And because it’s now abandoned, well, the electricity eventually gets cut off. And this left thousands of pounds of food, meat, dairy, produce, and packaged goods inside a sealed building during the Texas summer.
(05:26):
So the even worse was this happened during summer. It gets hot here, especially August, September, very, very hot. And so it gets really, really hot inside the store. Over the next two to three months, the food began to decompose. With our refrigeration, perishable items rapidly spoiled, producing gases, liquids, and overwhelming odors. The interior of the store became a breeding ground for bacteria such as E. Coli, as well as insects and rodents. Residents in the surrounding neighborhoods soon noticed a powerful foul smell. And people started complaining by about mid-October. They said it smelled like dead animals. And if you walked by the store, it would give them headaches. And so people didn’t know what it was. They’re complaining by October. This store, it smells horrible. They go and open the store and then they see what the investigators, first county crews go and show up there.
(06:18):
And it’s just a mess. It was so bad that they did tests of the air quality that the air was filled with toxic gases and had low oxygen levels because it’s a sealed store. The doors are all closed and locked. The air conditioner’s not running, no air filtration. So this food is decomposing, right? And it’s emitting stuff. Think about when bananas ripen, fruit and stuff when it ripens, it emits like methane gas. Normally, it barely does that. It doesn’t stay in one place, but if it’s all in one place, it’s producing these gases, it’s filling up the room. There’s not even enough oxygen in there to safely be in it. And then the bacteria has spread all over place, including stuff like E. Coli. The rats go in there to eat the food. The rats get sick and the rats die. Oh, just a horrible situation.
(07:03):
The situation worsened due to confusion over responsibility. Because the company had declared bankruptcy, ownership and liability for the property were unclear. The bank trustees and city officials initially hesitated or disagreed about who was responsible for addressing the hazard. This delay allowed conditions inside the store to deteriorate further, turning the building into a serious public health threat. And so they went in, they looked, the oxygen levels were too low. Regular people could not just go in there with trash bags and clean it up.You could die in there. So it says, “Cleanup crews had to wear full hazmat suits with air filtration systems. Workers used heavy equipment to remove decomposed food and contaminated liquids, transferring them into sealed containers that were then taken to the landfill.” But it was crazy inside, for example, milk chugs, they exploded because the lactic acid, lactic acid. I mean, that’s in your muscles, but lactose, that, I guess it can expand as a gas.
(08:01):
You got these jugs and they end up, they explode. And then you got rotten milk that’s exploded, that bacteria. They had to get rid of everything. I think they tried to save some of the cash registers, but even the canned food was so covered in bacteria, they felt it wasn’t safe and they threw it all away. So it says it was expensive. The initial estimates of around $10,000 quickly ballooned to reach thousands of dollars per day, tens of thousands of dollars, and it was unclear who would pay leading the city to consider placing a lien on the property. By late November, the food had been removed and the building disinfected though odors reportedly lingered even after, and none of the food could be salvaged. So what’s crazy is the building. The building is on 3900 Hempel Street, and I think later it ended up housing a Dollar General.
(08:47):
You would think it would’ve just been torn down and just raised to the earth. No, they just tried to clean it inside, subdivided it, and then it becomes a Dollar General, which is just slightly less gross than the Mexia supermarket. So there you go. That is the tale of the supermarket that became a biohazard. That was fun. I haven’t done this in a while. I’m going to do this more. If you listen to Free For All Friday faithfully, I appreciate it. You’re like a friend who gets to sit down with me and hear all my silly things I read and think about. So if you are faithfully listening and you enjoy the Free For All Fridays, I appreciate that. It’s like we’re sitting down and having a nice chat about all of the weirdo things I like to read about. So hope you guys enjoyed this and yeah, I just hope you have a very blessed weekend.