People who run a business will understand how important it is to find a good gimmick in order to encourage sales. Of course, the gimmick actually has to be ‘good’ in order to work. Pink Taco learned this the hard way when their little stunt of spray painting a donkey pink and writing “Pink Taco” over it ended up driving away customers instead of attracting them.

As if spraypainting the donkey pink wasn’t bad enough, they also chained the poor animal to a post and left it out under the 90-degree heat – all that was done in order to promote their ‘Cinco de Mayo’ specials. Ben Decker, a president of a public relations company, saw the incident and reported it to the SPCLA. Soon enough, the LA Policewent to Pink Taco and had them take the donkey home. The donkey was rented from Phil’s Animals. The company then defended themselves and Pink Taco saying that the animal was cared for at all times, that she was shaved before she was spraypainted with water-based non-toxic dye, given frequent rest periods, and given enough water to drink.

People were so outraged by the whole incident that pictures of the donkey and statements condemning Pink Taco went viral on both Facebook and Twitter in no time. Even celebrities deemed it worth their time to post about the donkey. The restaurant’s Facebook page gained thousands of ‘likes’ in the span of a few days, but none of them were ‘good intentioned’. As a result, Pink Taco was forced to close down both their Facebook and Twitter pages out of sheer shame over the incident.

One Pink Taco worker said that business was even running rather poorly since the incident took place. Indeed, it’s really hard to imagine that the restaurant will recover after this embarrassment.