A specialty butcher shop in my hometown of Charlotte is in full damage control mode this weekend. Several customers had doubts about where the store’s meat really came from. Those suspicions were confirmed several times over when an area television station decided to take a look. Within hours of the report, the shop’s owner was forced to apologize for deceiving his customers.
Victor Giroux has operated “What’s Your Beef?” in a strip shopping center in Charlotte’s fast-growing Ballantyne neighborhood since 2007. On the surface, it appears to be an upscale butcher shop that, as its Website boasts, sells “the best beef you can buy.” It also claims that its chicken is locally and organically raised. However, in recent months, several of the shop’s customers contacted WBTV in Charlotte with concerns about where Giroux got his meat.
WBTV finally decided to take a look, and ran a devastating investigative piece on Thursday night. Watch here.
Giroux claims that his meat is “all local.” However, WBTV spotted Giroux making several trips to a nearby Sam’s Club and loading what appeared to be packages of meat into his SUV. When WBTV’s Jamie Boll collared Giroux at “What’s Your Beef?” later, Giroux claimed those were actually fish burgers he was buying for his house. That would be believable if WBTV hadn’t also seen him driving from Sam’s to “What’s Your Beef?” and trundling several packages into his store.
Later, WBTV noticed that a year earlier, someone posted a video on YouTube showing that the coolers at “What’s Your Beef?” were stocked with packaged meats with the same labels you can get at the grocery store. The video was posted last year, but is only now coming to notice. A source inside the store took pictures that largely corroborated what was on that YouTube video. Two former employees revealed that Giroux passed these packaged meats off to his customers as meat from local farmers. The North Carolina Department of Agriculture actually scolded Giroux for falsely saying he sold “locally raised” meat that was “all natural” with “no hormones.” Giroux says he complied, saying that those claims were for grass-fed meat–but he didn’t have any on hand anymore.
This alone would be enough to raise eyebrows. But the former employees revealed something even more troubling, if possible–customers weren’t getting the meat they paid for. Tests on some of Giroux’ meat confirmed that he was indeed lying about what kind of meat he was selling. Some meat that was labeled as ground lamb wasn’t really lamb at all. Instead, it was really ordinary ground beef. A test of what was labeled as ground bison also revealed it was really ground beef. When confronted with the results, Giroux appeared to be dumbfounded.
Hours after WBTV’s report aired, Giroux took to his Facebook page to apologize to his customers. He admitted that his meat came from several vendors, not from local sources. It may not be enough to rebuild his customers’ trust, though. “What’s Your Beef?” has taken a well-deserved beating in recent days on Yelp. He apparently took an equally severe beating on Facebook as well; his store’s Facebook page has since been deleted.
North Carolina law explicitly forbids misrepresenting the species of meat. Inspectors from both Mecklenburg County and the state say they plan to take a closer look at “What’s Your Beef?” However, Giroux ought to save them the trouble. He has betrayed the most sacred trust between a businessman and his customers. If he has anything left in him, he will close his shop’s doors–permanently.
