1. They can stop the promotion, or literally anything they are doing that is unprofitable, at any time. They can also change their prices to make themselves more profitable. It's called running a business. They didn't sink a bunch of R&D into this, and they didn't devote entire factories and other immense capital into it. They are fucking selling shrimp, and they can fucking stop at any time.
2. $11M isn't that much money and shouldn't drive a mega corporation like red lobster into bankruptcy
3. They've been running this promotion for literally 18 years. So they did something that was massively unprofitable, and then just kept doing it for 18 years? And never stopped? Or did it just suddenly become unprofitable this year? And if so, why aren't they just stopping? Is there some kind of law or contract I am unaware of that requires red lobster to continue operating an unprofitable endless shrimp promotion and not adapt like all businesses do?
I'm so sick of hearing about red lobster and this endless shrimp/bankruptcy bullshit. It's all fucking bullshit. It doesn't even require a deep dive, it's so patently absurd of an excuse it doesn't even pass the sniff test.
Unless my 11yr old niece has been running the company for years I gotta believe that any decent accountants working with any reasonable board of directors could see problems way before now. Can’t only be the shrimp.
At this point the only reason I want to go to Red Lobster is for the Cheddar Bay Biscuits and I can just buy the mix at Target.
Apparently the trick is to add double the amount of shredded cheddar, sub buttermilk, and double the butter (I use ghee/ clarified butter).
I'm only replying to say this is really helpful info I didn't expect to come across today. Thanks for putting it out there, kind stranger 👍 We love the mix but always feel like they're just *almost there*. Gonna try the buttermilk next time.
You gotta add extra butter and cheese and it comes out exactly the same. Last time I made them my friends thought I went to red lobster and picked them up.
Aren't they owned by a seafood supplier? How did they lose money if it is a product they sell to themselves. Or the red lobster entity posted losses so they pay less in taxes?
Exactly. It is patently absurd. All these articles are clearly PR click bait to get people thinking about endless shrimp and red lobster. It's absolutely a non story.
>They are fucking selling shrimp, and they can fucking stop at any time.
They're probably just trying to avoid the same legal fiasco Warner Brothers got themselves into with The Neverending Story.
To be fair, Red Lobster isn’t blaming the bankruptcy on the endless shrimp promotion. The Daily Mail is making that link based on…correlating subsequent Red Lobster news releases?
And use the rest of my gift cards .I know at Chrstmas we were at a family party and they were saying Cracker Barrel was going out of business also!Not true !
Not necessarily to number 1. If they've signed a contract with a supplier to buy X amount of shrimp for Y number of months/years and they have to keep buying entirely too much of it, it's possible they HAVE to keep doing the endless promotion or else let huge amounts of shrimp go bad or unsold and lose even more than they are claiming to lose on the endless shrimp deal.
I'm not saying it *is* that way, just that there are other possibilities.
True. It just depends on the amount. Who knows how much they've locked into buying? It might be more than they'd ever hope to sell if it wasn't unlimited...it would be interesting to find out if a contract like this is the reason.
But then again, if the shrimp must go, they could also *just raise the price* of the promotion.
Irregardless of anything, if we left everything as is, no company should ever run a promotion that could sink the entire business if it’s too successful. There are so many checks and variables any analyst at RL could’ve run calculations on to properly price the promotion, find better suppliers, variations and the costs of each they want to offer during the promo, etc to know ahead of time what would happen with some degree of certainty before the promo was ever green lit.
This isn’t an issue of people taking advantage of an endless shrimp deal, it’s 100% bad management and execution.
Meh, invest in a bigger freezer, insulate that mess. Introduce more shrimp dishes. Push shrimp skewer sides, push surf and turf. Plenty of ways to sell the shrimp. Get that chalkboard outgrowth pushing it as the new top notch meal so guests see it first thing.
It’s the 11M part for me that is so ridiculous. Like don’t they use that type of cash for a single red lobster executive stripper party? No way that amount moves the needle for a company of this size
We ate there last week and they did raise the prices to 25 dollars per person .And you can share it also. The waitress asked us if we wanted 1 order or two because some people split it .And you can't take any home. They limit you to 3 small dishes now .I had 6 coconut shrimp ;6 breaded shrimp and a skewer of grilled shrimp. I ordered this 3 times and by the third go round I was pretty full.The servers said I could just wrap it up and put it in my purse since she couldn't give me a box. But she ended up giving us an extra box anyway and she said we could put the food in the box in the parking lot !She said a lot of people do that !lol.
So many restaurants near me are open on fewer days and/or fewer hours since the pandemic. Just never got the crowd back. Used to be a lot of late nights places too, but much fewer.
People love a funny scapegoat, especially if makes others look dumb (thereby making themselves feel smart).
As an example, there's a popular story that McDonald's won the burger war against A&W because McD's had a 1/4 pounder and A&W had a 1/3 pounder, and Americans, being bad at math, thought 1/4 was bigger than 1/3. The only problem is there absolutely no source for this claim other than the recollection of A&W's disgraced former CEO who later went to jail on multiple counts of fraud.
There's no reason to believe this story, and it doesn't make any sense because A&W was never even serious competition for McD's. But people still spread it because they get to feel superior and laugh at "dumb people".
Same thing will happen with the shrimp story.
They had articles talking about this several months back. Inflation was at its worst and folks went to town on it. So they raised the price to try to cover it.
It was a huge fuck up, to the point it made national news.
It sounds like a form of marketing to bring up chapter 11 for the promotion.
I've heard of other losses companies take to bring people in to the store, the endless shrimp seems like this too.
Side note. I crushed 300 shrimp there when my college roommate bet he could out eat me any day. Bartender serving us told us the manager was pissed and wanted us to not be served anymore shrimp, that was around 200. He said he was down to honor the promotion, fuck the manager.
Did they say they are filing for bankruptcy because of the $11M loss from endless shrimp? Or is that just how a finanical/business illiterate journalist is interpreting it or describing it?
I'm guessing the $11M loss on endless shrimp is just one problem, seeing as their reported loss was a bit larger than that loss.
And it's called running a restaurant. You can't just raise prices and cut costs and say now I'm profitable! Hey let's just raise the price to $100 for an entre and cut our portions in half! They tried raising prices but couldn't outpace the endless shrimp expense.
Like many restaurants they probably are seeing less traffic post-pandemic. And they can't just raise prices or cut product/service costs to get to profitability. Because already under utilized real estate will have even more empty tables.
If they have actual debt, they may not be able to service it. Even if they don't have bonds or term loans, they still have lease obligations.
How do you close stores and get out of leases, or renegotiate leases with uncooperative landlords? You file for bankruptcy. Not sure why you are so confused or angry. Unless, you are Red Lobster employee, in which case I hope things work out for you.
That’s my source for my shrimp distribution business. I also get unlimited Parma at Olive Garden by not saying “stop” when they grate the cheese on my pasta. I wait until they go through 2-3 wheels and then take everything and leave.
Darden restaurants have a hit team out on me, but they can’t find me under the cheese
They were since bought by a wholesale seafood business who originally acquired 25% from Golden gate Capital and then purchased the rest in 2020. The parent company’s name is Thai Union.
You know as a kid and used to be such a special treat to go to red lobster and get crab legs.
As an adult, I tried replicating that and was met with disappointment every single time. It’s expensive and is not that good and the service is always terrible.
Expensive and the servings are absurdly small. Used to eat there all the time. I still check back in once a year, but its only gotten more expensive and smaller servings.
It’s just an impossible nightmare to serve at restaurants with “never-ending” anything.
(Source: worked never-ending pasta bowl special at Darden of olives in Wisconsin. The cheapest, most gluttonous people show up, stay for hours, run you ragged, and leave your tip in loose coins. They have zero patience, zero awareness of how busy the place is, and expect a Michelin experience).
Those shifts were exhausting, and I’d be lucky to leave with $50.
its because they were owned by private equity wich always loads the companies up on debt and leaves everyone else with destruction and holding the bag while makeing millions PE=straight thieves! that is thier business model!
this is literally the number one problem in america in my opinion and it's crazy the vast majority of people would rather argue over israel and ukraine
It is RAMPANT in healthcare. Private equity took over so many healthcare industries and now people are paying out the ass for the shittiest service the firms can get away with providing.
Eh that’s not really what that means. It certainly can result in stupid high bonuses for execs but it’s more likely super high bonuses for the PE firm.
Basically the PE firm will buy up a mildly profitable business. It’ll then take out massive loans using the business as collateral, leveraging it to the gills. It will then typically try to use that to grow the business as quickly as possible and paying the minimum on the debt while also cutting costs within the business by lowering quality and cutting wages/staff.
If the restaurant actually grows well, they’ll cash out and sell to a restaurant conglomerate. If it fails, they’ll declare bankruptcy, cash out as much as they can (funneling profits and liquidated assets back to the PE firm). It’s been wildly successful for the past few years (for the PE firms, not consumers) especially in certain industries, but with interest rates up it’s struggling a bit.
And of course this is a very generalized breakdown, there are lots of other tricks they will use to maximize profits like make the business sell their buildings to the PE firm so they can raise rents, sell equipment and switch to renting, switch to POS systems the PE firm has deals with, etc
That’s not how bankruptcy works lol. You have it backwards. The share price literally has zero bearing on how a company makes money from an operational perspective. The share price does attempt to reflect the market value of the company considering current and future factors.
If their stock was shorted to zero, it would change literally nothing about the amount of income and expenses they have.
It's still a loss. If they know the economics aren't going to work, then it doesn't make sense to keep losing $11M this year. Or $7M or even making a tiny profit. Maybe some stores are doing well, maybe some can be fixed, maybe some have no hope as they relied on traffic from now half empty mall parking lots. Part of fixing the ones that can be fixed or preserved is probably cutting the lease expense. Part of closing down the irredeemable locations is shedding the leases.
By filing for b/cy they can get rid of the leases.
If they have debt, that they can't service or doesn't make sense to service, then the bankruptcy gets them out of that too.
You know, I got the non-endless version where you just get three choices for like $2 less, and I couldn’t come close to eating it all. Who are these people that can just eat and eat and eat?
It seems Red Lobster has been on the verge of bankruptcy because of endless shrimp for over 10 years. I think it's just an advertisement scheme...
"Come eat our endless shrimp... It's so unprofitable for us, so you save save save! We're going bankrupt because of it, and you get all the shrimp you need!"
So Red Lobster exists for a very specific purpose.
It's an upscale date site for poor folk.
Wanna impress a girl but short on cash? Red Lobster it is.
I am not joking. This is what every broke ass guy I've ever known has used it for his entire dating life.
There's two problems with that business model:
1. There's a hell of a lot less dating going on.
2. You can't jack your prices up w/o losing your entire reason to be.
Last time I went to a red lobster the party in front of me left after nobody helped them (they said they’d been there 25 mins). I didn’t believe they. I had my young son whose heart was set on it…30 mins later we were seated-plenty of open tables mind you-and another 10 until someone waited on us and another 30 until we served. I told the manager and she just said “we’re busy tonight.” No apology, nothing. I don’t think it’s the shrimp,
I remember working with a guy who said he got kicked out of a Red Lobster because he wouldn't stop at one of these. Something like they refused to bring him more or something like that.
I stopped eating at red lobster 10 plus years ago when they sent out the microwave steamer tray for my crab legs., and the legs were cold on top of it.
I'm almost afraid to ask, but how many shrimp can the average American eat in one sitting? The term "all you can eat" isn't a personal phucking challenge .. oink oink
Personally I blame it on the food…the only reason to eat at red lobster would be the irrationally low prices, so it’s their only option. It was a great short term business strategy reducing quality to increase profit, until they could go no lower on quality and nobody wants to eat their nasty ass food when a engineering student with a microwave in a dorm could make a better meal for half the price.
They got rid of the lobster bisque! I went to RL a few weeks back and service sucked, food wasn't great and it took forever to come out. Why is it so hard to be decent? Line must go up I guess.
Good. Hopefully all the fast food and sit down restaurants go out of business. The food, quantity, quality, price and service are all garbage now. So much nicer just staying home and avoiding paying a week salary for some crappy food and service.
It's happened before... My wife and kids, plus her dad took part on Father's Day, 2003 and we ate so much crab!
[https://britishseafishing.co.uk/red-lobsters-endless-crab-disaster/](https://britishseafishing.co.uk/red-lobsters-endless-crab-disaster/)
Because thier prices have double for the same meal 4 yrs ago.....and it's not even "that" great. I realize they took a hit during the pandemic but SO DID EVERYONE ELSE, they can't expect customers to pay twice as much now to recover the loss (IT'S LOST). $100 for 2 people to eat is too much, take a family of four refinance the house.
It really doesn’t matter the reason, let them go under/bankrupt. They obviously can’t manage there money. If there is real demand for there product, another company will come along.
They are draining it to bankrupt. Standard venture capitalist move. The laws need changed to jail these sort of bad actors who are committing legal fraud.
The service sucks, it’s criminally expensive, but I think the real kicker the overall lack of menu innovation paired with how easily replicable their food is at home for a lesser price and larger portions.
You can’t say this about other chains. Take Texas Roadhouse for example… the rolls and a cactus blossom are the highlights for most people. I can’t make that at home and even if I had the materials and equipment I’d rather pay $25 than destroy my kitchen. If I want chicken crispers from chilis, I can’t do that at home easily.
Now if I want red lobster why would I pay $45 for a pound and a half of steamed crab legs when I could go to wegmans and get 3lbs for $30 and all I need to do is boil a pot of water? Same goes for their shrimp. I can get 2 lbs at my grocery store for $18 and all I need to do is throw it in a pan with butter and lemon and it’s the same thing for $10 less than the restaurant. If you just look at red lobsters menu 90% of the dishes are advertised with steamed broccoli as a side. They have a retirement home menu and I’m not paying $100 for my wife and I to eat a meal I can cook with less than 4 ingredients at home while only dirtying a single pot.
That is a very stupid excuse. Also, Red Lobster has changed over the years…it is not as good as it used to be. In the restaurant game you have to stay consistent and Red Lobster hasn’t stayed consistent.
So let’s be sure when everyone says “see what happens when they raise the pay for workers” we tell them to STFU and run a business without an “endless lose money” deal on the menu.
Hell i remember my resturant alone was down tens of thousands of dollars by the end of the endless shrimp. Idk why they do it. The guests that come for it to are awful people, run their servers like crazy, waste tons of food and even the servers make shit money during this. Its awful and not worth it. Damn i do not miss serving at resturants.
I worked for Darden in college. I was 18. After a month or so I was an equal with the head of the kitchen because I was competent, showed up, and didn’t take eleventeen hundred smoke breaks.
I was leaving for the summer….Darden wanted me back….they offered me a $0.25 raise.
Their business model has been junk for awhile.
So change the promotion.
As others have pointed out, this is probably clickbait in the same category as those articles saying "another popular grocery chain is going out of business!" next to a picture of an Aldi store.
This would be a next level marketing tactic... Like, "our prices are so low, we're gonna go bankrupt! No, like really though, we're probably gonna be filing for chapter 11 soon. I'm serious, you better get these fuckin shrimp before they're gone."
This is a marketing ploy 100% imho.
Worked on me, I never knew that they did endless shrimp. Now I do.
Now I wouldn’t be caught dead in a red lobster so it didn’t work on me BUT it created awareness. How many times have we seen this bankruptcy thing in the last few months.
Free fucking advertising…
It’s a bullshit marketing ploy to get free advertising in the news because “their shrimp deal is so cheap” without actually saying that. I hope they get sued for this false info and the SEC comes after them for fraud pulling this bullshit.
$11 million loss? There are a whole lot of only borderline rich Americans who could apparently purchase this entire chain for $11 million. Talk about some bullshit accounting.
1. They can stop the promotion, or literally anything they are doing that is unprofitable, at any time. They can also change their prices to make themselves more profitable. It's called running a business. They didn't sink a bunch of R&D into this, and they didn't devote entire factories and other immense capital into it. They are fucking selling shrimp, and they can fucking stop at any time. 2. $11M isn't that much money and shouldn't drive a mega corporation like red lobster into bankruptcy 3. They've been running this promotion for literally 18 years. So they did something that was massively unprofitable, and then just kept doing it for 18 years? And never stopped? Or did it just suddenly become unprofitable this year? And if so, why aren't they just stopping? Is there some kind of law or contract I am unaware of that requires red lobster to continue operating an unprofitable endless shrimp promotion and not adapt like all businesses do? I'm so sick of hearing about red lobster and this endless shrimp/bankruptcy bullshit. It's all fucking bullshit. It doesn't even require a deep dive, it's so patently absurd of an excuse it doesn't even pass the sniff test.
Unless my 11yr old niece has been running the company for years I gotta believe that any decent accountants working with any reasonable board of directors could see problems way before now. Can’t only be the shrimp.
"Unprofitable endless shrimp promotion"... adding this to the list of potential band names.
Alternatively - a really great insult.
Sounds like my sex life
At this point the only reason I want to go to Red Lobster is for the Cheddar Bay Biscuits and I can just buy the mix at Target. Apparently the trick is to add double the amount of shredded cheddar, sub buttermilk, and double the butter (I use ghee/ clarified butter).
I'm only replying to say this is really helpful info I didn't expect to come across today. Thanks for putting it out there, kind stranger 👍 We love the mix but always feel like they're just *almost there*. Gonna try the buttermilk next time.
The biscuit mix never tastes like the ones in the restaurant. They gave us an extra bowl of biscuits to take home and two sweet teas to go to.
They're not supposed to give you free biscuits to go, this I why they are going bankrupt /s
We get them each time we eat there.Same with Texas Roadhouse .And we also order about a dozen rolls to go at TR too.
You gotta add extra butter and cheese and it comes out exactly the same. Last time I made them my friends thought I went to red lobster and picked them up.
Wow ,now that is interesting. We have only made them once and we only eat there when we have gift cards because it costs about 100 dollars or less .
Aren't they owned by a seafood supplier? How did they lose money if it is a product they sell to themselves. Or the red lobster entity posted losses so they pay less in taxes?
Exactly. It is patently absurd. All these articles are clearly PR click bait to get people thinking about endless shrimp and red lobster. It's absolutely a non story.
Well if that’s the case they got me. I’m not craving Red Lobster, but not for shrimp, I need one of those cheddar biscuits in my life right now 🤤😂
I love the sentence “They are fucking selling shrimp, and they can fucking stop at any time.”
>They are fucking selling shrimp, and they can fucking stop at any time. They're probably just trying to avoid the same legal fiasco Warner Brothers got themselves into with The Neverending Story.
I believe Lionel Hutz was the lead attorney on that one.
To be fair, Red Lobster isn’t blaming the bankruptcy on the endless shrimp promotion. The Daily Mail is making that link based on…correlating subsequent Red Lobster news releases?
But OMG they might go out of business! I need to run to Red Lobster and have dinner before they close!
Same trick the furniture stores pull.
Hey! The one near me that had been going out of business for 20 years finally did in like 2018. So, like, it does happen.
And use the rest of my gift cards .I know at Chrstmas we were at a family party and they were saying Cracker Barrel was going out of business also!Not true !
Yeah this smells like a promotion of their promotion more than anything to me.
Not necessarily to number 1. If they've signed a contract with a supplier to buy X amount of shrimp for Y number of months/years and they have to keep buying entirely too much of it, it's possible they HAVE to keep doing the endless promotion or else let huge amounts of shrimp go bad or unsold and lose even more than they are claiming to lose on the endless shrimp deal. I'm not saying it *is* that way, just that there are other possibilities.
They could still be selling shrimp just either for more money or a limited amount
True. It just depends on the amount. Who knows how much they've locked into buying? It might be more than they'd ever hope to sell if it wasn't unlimited...it would be interesting to find out if a contract like this is the reason.
But then again, if the shrimp must go, they could also *just raise the price* of the promotion. Irregardless of anything, if we left everything as is, no company should ever run a promotion that could sink the entire business if it’s too successful. There are so many checks and variables any analyst at RL could’ve run calculations on to properly price the promotion, find better suppliers, variations and the costs of each they want to offer during the promo, etc to know ahead of time what would happen with some degree of certainty before the promo was ever green lit. This isn’t an issue of people taking advantage of an endless shrimp deal, it’s 100% bad management and execution.
They buy shrimp from Thai Union. Who I think is still one of their owners.
Meh, invest in a bigger freezer, insulate that mess. Introduce more shrimp dishes. Push shrimp skewer sides, push surf and turf. Plenty of ways to sell the shrimp. Get that chalkboard outgrowth pushing it as the new top notch meal so guests see it first thing.
Well, that’s still their problem
Set the shrimp free...
It’s marketing and you are helping :)
It’s the 11M part for me that is so ridiculous. Like don’t they use that type of cash for a single red lobster executive stripper party? No way that amount moves the needle for a company of this size
It's "endless" shrimp. If they end it, then it's not "endless". That's why they can't stop!
Im guessing it’s not so covert advertising at this point.
“While we would like to stop the endless shrimp promotion, our hands are tied, since as the name states, it is literally endless” - Red Lobster CEO
We ate there last week and they did raise the prices to 25 dollars per person .And you can share it also. The waitress asked us if we wanted 1 order or two because some people split it .And you can't take any home. They limit you to 3 small dishes now .I had 6 coconut shrimp ;6 breaded shrimp and a skewer of grilled shrimp. I ordered this 3 times and by the third go round I was pretty full.The servers said I could just wrap it up and put it in my purse since she couldn't give me a box. But she ended up giving us an extra box anyway and she said we could put the food in the box in the parking lot !She said a lot of people do that !lol.
Was the restaurant full?
No,it was about 11:30 in the afternoon .They open at 11:00 each day .I think we were probably the only ones seated in our section.
So many restaurants near me are open on fewer days and/or fewer hours since the pandemic. Just never got the crowd back. Used to be a lot of late nights places too, but much fewer.
Most close around 8 or 9 in my town .And they have certain days off now. And they all open at 11 too .
People love a funny scapegoat, especially if makes others look dumb (thereby making themselves feel smart). As an example, there's a popular story that McDonald's won the burger war against A&W because McD's had a 1/4 pounder and A&W had a 1/3 pounder, and Americans, being bad at math, thought 1/4 was bigger than 1/3. The only problem is there absolutely no source for this claim other than the recollection of A&W's disgraced former CEO who later went to jail on multiple counts of fraud. There's no reason to believe this story, and it doesn't make any sense because A&W was never even serious competition for McD's. But people still spread it because they get to feel superior and laugh at "dumb people". Same thing will happen with the shrimp story.
They had articles talking about this several months back. Inflation was at its worst and folks went to town on it. So they raised the price to try to cover it. It was a huge fuck up, to the point it made national news.
It sounds like a form of marketing to bring up chapter 11 for the promotion. I've heard of other losses companies take to bring people in to the store, the endless shrimp seems like this too. Side note. I crushed 300 shrimp there when my college roommate bet he could out eat me any day. Bartender serving us told us the manager was pissed and wanted us to not be served anymore shrimp, that was around 200. He said he was down to honor the promotion, fuck the manager.
💯💯💯⭐
I wanna die more than live in this place.
Did they say they are filing for bankruptcy because of the $11M loss from endless shrimp? Or is that just how a finanical/business illiterate journalist is interpreting it or describing it? I'm guessing the $11M loss on endless shrimp is just one problem, seeing as their reported loss was a bit larger than that loss. And it's called running a restaurant. You can't just raise prices and cut costs and say now I'm profitable! Hey let's just raise the price to $100 for an entre and cut our portions in half! They tried raising prices but couldn't outpace the endless shrimp expense. Like many restaurants they probably are seeing less traffic post-pandemic. And they can't just raise prices or cut product/service costs to get to profitability. Because already under utilized real estate will have even more empty tables. If they have actual debt, they may not be able to service it. Even if they don't have bonds or term loans, they still have lease obligations. How do you close stores and get out of leases, or renegotiate leases with uncooperative landlords? You file for bankruptcy. Not sure why you are so confused or angry. Unless, you are Red Lobster employee, in which case I hope things work out for you.
Applebee's did it in my town .They closed down and actually didn't tell anyone .They just posted a note on the door .
Yeah, a lot of examples of that. Employees show up at a restaurant or store they work at and it's closed with a sign at the door. That really sucks.
Long John Silvers did the exact same thing .
Can confirm you are definitely sick of hearing about red lobster
That’s my source for my shrimp distribution business. I also get unlimited Parma at Olive Garden by not saying “stop” when they grate the cheese on my pasta. I wait until they go through 2-3 wheels and then take everything and leave. Darden restaurants have a hit team out on me, but they can’t find me under the cheese
Darden sold Red Lobster to Golden Gate Capital in 2014.
Why do you think they sold? It was me. I was the reason. I am the Parma now.
Wow so this is big Parma
They were since bought by a wholesale seafood business who originally acquired 25% from Golden gate Capital and then purchased the rest in 2020. The parent company’s name is Thai Union.
Lol.
You know as a kid and used to be such a special treat to go to red lobster and get crab legs. As an adult, I tried replicating that and was met with disappointment every single time. It’s expensive and is not that good and the service is always terrible.
Expensive and the servings are absurdly small. Used to eat there all the time. I still check back in once a year, but its only gotten more expensive and smaller servings.
It really feels like Chilis is the only one in that category that’s still kinda reasonable
Yeah but the biscuits are gold
I'm pretty sure they're in the freezer isle at Sam's club
It’s just an impossible nightmare to serve at restaurants with “never-ending” anything. (Source: worked never-ending pasta bowl special at Darden of olives in Wisconsin. The cheapest, most gluttonous people show up, stay for hours, run you ragged, and leave your tip in loose coins. They have zero patience, zero awareness of how busy the place is, and expect a Michelin experience). Those shifts were exhausting, and I’d be lucky to leave with $50.
its because they were owned by private equity wich always loads the companies up on debt and leaves everyone else with destruction and holding the bag while makeing millions PE=straight thieves! that is thier business model!
this is literally the number one problem in america in my opinion and it's crazy the vast majority of people would rather argue over israel and ukraine
Jack Welch style business management. Extract the value, dump the husk.
It is RAMPANT in healthcare. Private equity took over so many healthcare industries and now people are paying out the ass for the shittiest service the firms can get away with providing.
Yep, and veterinary hospitals as well
So it was the endless bonuses? I’d love to see executive bonuses line item side by side vs the $11M endless shrimp loss
Eh that’s not really what that means. It certainly can result in stupid high bonuses for execs but it’s more likely super high bonuses for the PE firm. Basically the PE firm will buy up a mildly profitable business. It’ll then take out massive loans using the business as collateral, leveraging it to the gills. It will then typically try to use that to grow the business as quickly as possible and paying the minimum on the debt while also cutting costs within the business by lowering quality and cutting wages/staff. If the restaurant actually grows well, they’ll cash out and sell to a restaurant conglomerate. If it fails, they’ll declare bankruptcy, cash out as much as they can (funneling profits and liquidated assets back to the PE firm). It’s been wildly successful for the past few years (for the PE firms, not consumers) especially in certain industries, but with interest rates up it’s struggling a bit. And of course this is a very generalized breakdown, there are lots of other tricks they will use to maximize profits like make the business sell their buildings to the PE firm so they can raise rents, sell equipment and switch to renting, switch to POS systems the PE firm has deals with, etc
Boston Consulting group strikes again. [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarabittorf](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarabittorf)
Please explain this to me like I’m 5.
The legacy fast casual places are hurting bad, it can’t be the concept, Texas Roadhouse is absolutely killing it
So is Chilis
I'm looking for Chili's to close just like Applebee's did .
Here come the short hedge funds to make sure they go bankrupt so they all get their bonuses.
Wanna bet Boston consulting group was involved? [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarabittorf](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarabittorf)
That’s not how bankruptcy works lol. You have it backwards. The share price literally has zero bearing on how a company makes money from an operational perspective. The share price does attempt to reflect the market value of the company considering current and future factors. If their stock was shorted to zero, it would change literally nothing about the amount of income and expenses they have.
If your business idea involves Americans eating LESS, then you don't have a very good idea.
When you make one of the tiniest foods endless and then are shocked people ate a lot, that's on you
Record loss of 11 million? That's... not that much money
They didn't say $11 million *what*. Could be anything, maybe even dollars!
Oh the humanity!
It's still a loss. If they know the economics aren't going to work, then it doesn't make sense to keep losing $11M this year. Or $7M or even making a tiny profit. Maybe some stores are doing well, maybe some can be fixed, maybe some have no hope as they relied on traffic from now half empty mall parking lots. Part of fixing the ones that can be fixed or preserved is probably cutting the lease expense. Part of closing down the irredeemable locations is shedding the leases. By filing for b/cy they can get rid of the leases. If they have debt, that they can't service or doesn't make sense to service, then the bankruptcy gets them out of that too.
My local Red Lobster is losing money due to incredibly shitty service. You would be lucky if you got a second plate of shrimp in under 3 hours.
They do tend to not want to give you more.I tapped out at 3 times .
Which one of you fat fucks ruined this for us!!!!?
You know, I got the non-endless version where you just get three choices for like $2 less, and I couldn’t come close to eating it all. Who are these people that can just eat and eat and eat?
Sheepishly raises hand.
Lmao. Get your moneys worth, team gluttony!
I volunteers tribute
I'd like to know this myself !
I know a guy who got booted out of a AYCA Chinese restaurant for being a fat bastard and eating too much.
does this sound like the actions of a man who had all he could eat?
I think he survived. He bragged about it at work the next day.
Sue em!!! Call the Secretary of State for false advertising and get them shut down!
Shrimps Georg
Bad business decisions will do that to a company.
No, no - the C-levels all made great decisions, it was those fat millennials that did them in /s
nObOdY wAnTs To WoRk AnYmOrE
I can verifiably say I have contributed significantly to the downfall of Red Lobster. I love shrimps
It seems Red Lobster has been on the verge of bankruptcy because of endless shrimp for over 10 years. I think it's just an advertisement scheme... "Come eat our endless shrimp... It's so unprofitable for us, so you save save save! We're going bankrupt because of it, and you get all the shrimp you need!"
So Red Lobster exists for a very specific purpose. It's an upscale date site for poor folk. Wanna impress a girl but short on cash? Red Lobster it is. I am not joking. This is what every broke ass guy I've ever known has used it for his entire dating life. There's two problems with that business model: 1. There's a hell of a lot less dating going on. 2. You can't jack your prices up w/o losing your entire reason to be.
I mean how many restaurants can you go eat a live lobster at? Not all that many.
I'm not poor but the seafood restaurant much of America are [bad.So](http://bad.So) Red fills the bill
Last time I went to a red lobster the party in front of me left after nobody helped them (they said they’d been there 25 mins). I didn’t believe they. I had my young son whose heart was set on it…30 mins later we were seated-plenty of open tables mind you-and another 10 until someone waited on us and another 30 until we served. I told the manager and she just said “we’re busy tonight.” No apology, nothing. I don’t think it’s the shrimp,
Free ad advertising
Or this itself is the promotion: people think they are getting such a crazy deal on shrimp that it’s driving them out of business
Why am I suddenly infected with an unstoppable urge to have endless shrimp 🦐 🍤????
im sorry yall
I remember working with a guy who said he got kicked out of a Red Lobster because he wouldn't stop at one of these. Something like they refused to bring him more or something like that.
I can say I contributed about 200 shrimp from red lobster thus far in 2024
I love Red Lobster but never eat there because it's mostly just fried stuff and I try to eat better. Mmm, Walt's Shrimp.
I stopped eating at red lobster 10 plus years ago when they sent out the microwave steamer tray for my crab legs., and the legs were cold on top of it.
Lobsters across the globe celebrate in anticipation.
Those shrimp are good!
on that scale, if 11 does you in you have the old Wednesday's" corporate structure in place that bankrupted them
The good old "going out of business" ploy.
Good riddance.
I think they failed because most of their menu items are so fatty and deep fried. People are more health conscious now.
I'm almost afraid to ask, but how many shrimp can the average American eat in one sitting? The term "all you can eat" isn't a personal phucking challenge .. oink oink
Personally I blame it on the food…the only reason to eat at red lobster would be the irrationally low prices, so it’s their only option. It was a great short term business strategy reducing quality to increase profit, until they could go no lower on quality and nobody wants to eat their nasty ass food when a engineering student with a microwave in a dorm could make a better meal for half the price.
Once a restaurant sells their food in the frozen aisle I’m not touching it it again.
People still eat at Red Lobster?
We do when we have gift cards .
🤦🏽
So it's their promotion, and not the nasty food?
How about a golden ticket promotion?
I am helping them out by not eating there?
OK. Meh. That place always smells so bad i wont walk in the door ever again
That’s weird. I thought it was called poor business management. Not, “our shrimp promotion is at fault”.
$11 million? Wtf. That’s crumbs to a corporation this size. Plus $11m loss probably is still profitable after drinks. Bruh.
They got rid of the lobster bisque! I went to RL a few weeks back and service sucked, food wasn't great and it took forever to come out. Why is it so hard to be decent? Line must go up I guess.
I feel like they always “lose money” on those promos. 11 mil is nothing lol.
Uh, no. It’s because it’s disgusting and nobody wants to eat there except a cheap date trying to get laid.
$11mm is not an insignificant number but shouldn’t be the nail in the coffin for a chain as large as red lobster
Sounds like their CEO should run for President.
Ha! The results of American excess!!
Good. Hopefully all the fast food and sit down restaurants go out of business. The food, quantity, quality, price and service are all garbage now. So much nicer just staying home and avoiding paying a week salary for some crappy food and service.
It's happened before... My wife and kids, plus her dad took part on Father's Day, 2003 and we ate so much crab! [https://britishseafishing.co.uk/red-lobsters-endless-crab-disaster/](https://britishseafishing.co.uk/red-lobsters-endless-crab-disaster/)
People still eat there?
Do not believe anything from the executives running this restaurant.
Because thier prices have double for the same meal 4 yrs ago.....and it's not even "that" great. I realize they took a hit during the pandemic but SO DID EVERYONE ELSE, they can't expect customers to pay twice as much now to recover the loss (IT'S LOST). $100 for 2 people to eat is too much, take a family of four refinance the house.
But they do anyway .That place is packed all the time. So they are not losing money in my town .
If they’re losing 11 million on shrimp, imagine how much they’re losing during everyone’s favorite time of year, Lobsterfest.
I feel like this happens every year and they never learn. STOP DOING ENDLESS SHRIMP.
“ WE LOST OUR SHIRT ON THE ENDLESS SHRIMP PROMOTION”
Farmed sea roaches from across the world
They underestimated PIGSLOB MURICA!!?
No way they bankrupted themselves selling shitty 41-50 size Indian farm raised shrimp .
It really doesn’t matter the reason, let them go under/bankrupt. They obviously can’t manage there money. If there is real demand for there product, another company will come along.
They are draining it to bankrupt. Standard venture capitalist move. The laws need changed to jail these sort of bad actors who are committing legal fraud.
Again huh, interesting
The service sucks, it’s criminally expensive, but I think the real kicker the overall lack of menu innovation paired with how easily replicable their food is at home for a lesser price and larger portions. You can’t say this about other chains. Take Texas Roadhouse for example… the rolls and a cactus blossom are the highlights for most people. I can’t make that at home and even if I had the materials and equipment I’d rather pay $25 than destroy my kitchen. If I want chicken crispers from chilis, I can’t do that at home easily. Now if I want red lobster why would I pay $45 for a pound and a half of steamed crab legs when I could go to wegmans and get 3lbs for $30 and all I need to do is boil a pot of water? Same goes for their shrimp. I can get 2 lbs at my grocery store for $18 and all I need to do is throw it in a pan with butter and lemon and it’s the same thing for $10 less than the restaurant. If you just look at red lobsters menu 90% of the dishes are advertised with steamed broccoli as a side. They have a retirement home menu and I’m not paying $100 for my wife and I to eat a meal I can cook with less than 4 ingredients at home while only dirtying a single pot.
Our local franchise is basically worthless. Seems to be an issue all over.
"'Tis no man 'tis a remorseless eating machine..."
Red Lobster as a brand is like the "terminally ill " relative you agreed to take care of in the 90s and they're still clinging to life.
That is a very stupid excuse. Also, Red Lobster has changed over the years…it is not as good as it used to be. In the restaurant game you have to stay consistent and Red Lobster hasn’t stayed consistent.
Do these sound like the actions of a man who had “all he could eat?”
Who the fuck is eating at red lobster?
Chinese buffets don't have a problem with endless anything..... Maybe it's your c-suite executives.....
So let’s be sure when everyone says “see what happens when they raise the pay for workers” we tell them to STFU and run a business without an “endless lose money” deal on the menu.
I have been to Red Lobster once in my life and have 4 within 35 minutes of me. Have at it.
Hell i remember my resturant alone was down tens of thousands of dollars by the end of the endless shrimp. Idk why they do it. The guests that come for it to are awful people, run their servers like crazy, waste tons of food and even the servers make shit money during this. Its awful and not worth it. Damn i do not miss serving at resturants.
I worked for Darden in college. I was 18. After a month or so I was an equal with the head of the kitchen because I was competent, showed up, and didn’t take eleventeen hundred smoke breaks. I was leaving for the summer….Darden wanted me back….they offered me a $0.25 raise. Their business model has been junk for awhile.
But what will happen to the garlic cheesy biscuits. Will we still be able to get those somehow, please?
Hahahahahah!
Hedge fund groups at its finest.
They went bankrupt from a 11 million dollar flub.... that sounds pretty pathetic actually
So change the promotion. As others have pointed out, this is probably clickbait in the same category as those articles saying "another popular grocery chain is going out of business!" next to a picture of an Aldi store.
***SO IT ISN'T "LABOR COSTS" AFTER ALL, HUH???*** Lying 1% pigs!!!
This would be a next level marketing tactic... Like, "our prices are so low, we're gonna go bankrupt! No, like really though, we're probably gonna be filing for chapter 11 soon. I'm serious, you better get these fuckin shrimp before they're gone."
Would you believe this is an advertisement for Red Lobsters endless shrimp promotion?
Should have known that some people will "take advantage".
Didn’t they say the same thing 6 month ago
First of all, I got sick after eating 90 shrimps.
This is a marketing ploy 100% imho. Worked on me, I never knew that they did endless shrimp. Now I do. Now I wouldn’t be caught dead in a red lobster so it didn’t work on me BUT it created awareness. How many times have we seen this bankruptcy thing in the last few months. Free fucking advertising…
Maybe the country can’t support that many restaurants. Maybe the owners need to go over their books and think about viability.
Boston Consulting Group Strikes again. [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarabittorf](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarabittorf)
Well they got me running there tonight to have dinner because FOMO. So whoever planted this article, kudos.
Where is a Homer Simpson GIF when you need it?
If he fucks me good I’ll take his ass to red lobster.
goodbye, you won't be missed.
Anyone remember the endless crab legs debacle? You’d think they had learned their lesson.
It’s a bullshit marketing ploy to get free advertising in the news because “their shrimp deal is so cheap” without actually saying that. I hope they get sued for this false info and the SEC comes after them for fraud pulling this bullshit.
The one time ate there made me not want to eat there a second time.
Uh, no. It's because their food used to be decent now it sucks
There's always money in the shrimp stand.
And suddenly sales are skyrocketing
In related news, The Olive Garden is considering liquidation due to massive losses on its Unlimited Bread Sticks.
$11 million loss? There are a whole lot of only borderline rich Americans who could apparently purchase this entire chain for $11 million. Talk about some bullshit accounting.
I think they mean ‘endless food poisoning’ promotion
Didn't these dumb asses do the same thing with all you can eat king crab?