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The fishy death of Red Lobster

businessinsider.com

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Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#351

Post by quesera »

SoftTalker wrote: post #132
coldtea wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fundamental problem is that all of these businesses are devoid of soul, and the majority of the profits don't go to the people working them. That however is a problem of capitalism in general, not Olive Garden in particular. And I'd say class snobbism against lower class "taste" (independent of unhealthy fast food vs fine cuisine, since for example something like In and Out is totally acceptable by the same peo…

> the majority of the profits don't go to the people working them False. A well run restaurant might make 10% profit. But they pay double or triple that to the staff and managers.

Staff and management don't get paid with profits, by definition. They get paid with revenue.

Business profits, if any, accrue to owners.

Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#352

Post by rnd0 »

wnc3141 wrote: post #187
asdfman123 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private equity takeovers are often just scams to convert customer trust to short-term profits, but labeled as growth. You can get away with cutting quality for a little while, but eventually customers are going to lose trust and you're not going to get it back.

the whole point is to flip the business in 5ish years.

So goodfellas, basically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPtjyqgZAUk

Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#353

Post by quantified »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #293
quantified wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When and where did that really ever work? Evidence please. The bible says nothing about America. I assume that abolishing slavery was where we turned away from biblical principles.

You don’t even really need it. You can go right to the roots. Let’s compare two sets of things on a basic level. 1. You know God will judge what good or evil you did at the end of your life. You factor that into your decisions. 2. You think we’re an accident, nothing matters, people are just over animals, actually just chemical reactions, universe itself disappears in enough time, nothing matters in the long term unl…

Good morals are basic math: create the world you want to live in. Golden rule and all that.

It turns out that Allah and Vishnu are both quite popular. And none of it supported by actual evidence. We can do better. God's plan is never to reveal that God makes any sense, just random whims. The immoral false prophets get rich and influence millions. So, gotta wait until you die to find out? Maybe. But the Abrahamic bible is so full of misinterpreted BS as to be unusable.

Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#354

Post by hakfoo »

babypuncher wrote: post #316
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire schtick of chain restaurants is consistency. For nationwide chains, that means that the same ingredients end up being used in relatively remote places without cheap access to fresh produce as in, say, California, where fresh produce is far more affordable. The big chains also tend to aim for excessive variety on their menus, which again leads to food needing to be designed to be less perishable. And then t…

All of this just doesn't seem like it flies with consumers in 2024. I think people value quality over consistency when it comes to their leisure spending, especially when small restaurants can still be consistently good. Why do I care that the pancakes at an IHOP in Tampa taste the same as the IHOP in my neighborhood when the local diner across the street makes better pancakes than either of them? Having lots of opti…

I believe there is some market for consistency when your market is explicitly travelers.

This is probably why so many motels have chain restaurants in the parking lot: if you've just spent 7 hours in the car getting there, or are primarily staying there on the way to get somewhere else, convenient and predictable trumps good.

Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#355

Post by RestlessMind »

wvenable wrote: post #182
asdfman123 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increasingly I think the financialization of everything makes us less capable of understanding the world. "Red Lobster failed because of X corporate restructuring," "Red Lobster succeeded due to Y ad campaign." People go to restaurants for reasons completely unrelated to things like that. Those things are important, but just constitute the small slice of reality that can easily be measured. I saw a Twitter thread arg…

We live in a time where almost everything is getting worse. Products are getting smaller, service is getting worse, businesses are closing, quality is going down. I don't think I've ever experienced such an obvious decline in commercial society in my entire life. Is it the financialization of everything? Is that we reached peak growth and profit increases are only possibly through extreme optimization? Is it financia…

In case it helps you, I find the following products / services have improved their quality and offering in the past decade:

TVs: I get a much nicer TV now for the same amount what I paid for a crappier one in 2012

Smartphones: very powerful and do a lot of things better (eg. camera, connectivity)

Entertainment: Netflix, HBO, Hulu, Prime, ... you can pick 1-2 of those, binge all you want and then rotate. Costs Travel options: Ok, even in 2014, there were very good travel options. But I see a lot more options these days (direct flights from SF, more obscure locations on the travel map etc)

Cars: I bought a new car in 2021 (previous one was 2010). New one is cheaper and has some nicer features (rear view & other cameras, various warning signals)

Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#356

Post by ChickeNES »

outop wrote: post #266
quantified wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's because someone involved in that decision decided it was worth paying more for or not worth paying what they were currently paying, taking into account what factors will make people change their mind about eating there. Evidently not really taking the factors into account. Would the limited partners eat there? More than once?

I don't see the relevance of this. No one eats at Red Lobster thinking "this is the exact dinner experience that billionaires would design for themselves". Walmart is a family owned business. Do you think that the Walton family buy groceries and home furnishings there? McDonald's is a public company. Do you think that its CEO and the fund managers who hold the biggest stakes in it regularly eat there?

> McDonald's is a public company. Do you think that its CEO and the fund managers who hold the biggest stakes in it regularly eat there?

Yes: https://financialpost.com/executive/mcdonalds-new-ceo-eats-a...

Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#357

Post by Intralexical »

wvenable wrote: post #182
asdfman123 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increasingly I think the financialization of everything makes us less capable of understanding the world. "Red Lobster failed because of X corporate restructuring," "Red Lobster succeeded due to Y ad campaign." People go to restaurants for reasons completely unrelated to things like that. Those things are important, but just constitute the small slice of reality that can easily be measured. I saw a Twitter thread arg…

We live in a time where almost everything is getting worse. Products are getting smaller, service is getting worse, businesses are closing, quality is going down. I don't think I've ever experienced such an obvious decline in commercial society in my entire life. Is it the financialization of everything? Is that we reached peak growth and profit increases are only possibly through extreme optimization? Is it financia…

Corporate consolidation, some would say. IIRC, at some point in the last some decades, the US got the bright idea that antitrust isn't really worth enforcing if potentially anticompetitive business practices and mergers can also result in lower prices.

That kinda works— Until a small handful of corporations gain enough power that there is not really any meaningful competition anymore, and they can effectively engage in price-gouging with monopoly power. Which has now happened, apparently, in most industries. …Hence everything getting worse.

…I think there was an article I read some time back that explained it really well. But I can't seem to find it, so these links will have to do. The Guardian/Youtube ones might seem clickbaity, but that man was also Clinton's Secretary of Labor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/11/compan...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMZKegjJurk

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/08/biden-assault-monop...

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

https://www.theverge.com/23645057/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-...

https://news.yale.edu/2024/04/24/lax-antitrust-enforcement-l...

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/675862

Ticketmaster, Facebook, grocery prices, even the Boeing 737 mess— I suppose a lot of these problems do basically come down to a company or an oligopoly getting so powerful that nobody can hold it accountable anymore.

Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#358

Post by Intralexical »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #278
wvenable wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in a time where almost everything is getting worse. Products are getting smaller, service is getting worse, businesses are closing, quality is going down. I don't think I've ever experienced such an obvious decline in commercial society in my entire life. Is it the financialization of everything? Is that we reached peak growth and profit increases are only possibly through extreme optimization? Is it financia…

Most people used to believe in Jesus Christ with values built on the Bible. That was true from lay people to Ivy League colleges to even folks in prison. His blessings with His accountability both made many good things happen and limited lots of damage we’d cause. America was prosperous as the Bible said it would be. Over the decades, people turned away from God and those values to chase new ones: money first, pleasu…

I'm a little bit concerned about Jesus crashing the fishing industry by dumping product onto the market at prices that are too low for anybody else to compete with. It would be especially bad if it triggers some kind of broader trade war. It would be better if there was some way to quantify the risk involved.

Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#359

Post by outop »

devilbunny wrote: post #327
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The example of McDonald's acquiring value through real estate, funded by the business, is pretty poingnant, considering the PE firm here did the exact opposite: sold all the valuable real estate and rented it back from the buyer under crippling rent payments, funded by the business. Why did the PE firm do that when McDonald's didn't?

Because the PE firm had partners who bought the underlying real estate for themselves. I'm sure that there are PE firms that really do try to make businesses successful and profitable, but the vast majority are in it to sell off anything of value and dump all the ensuing debt into a company that will shortly go bankrupt. If you own a company, and a PE firm buys one of your clients, that should be a hint to require pr…

Your first point: this would obviously be serious fraud. I'm not sure if you have any evidence of this in this particular case or is you are alleging this is standard practice by PE funds?

Your second point: why would someone lend money to a company which was going to go bankrupt? If PE firms always made the companies they controlled bankrupt, no one would lend to them.

Your third point: if someone buys a company from you, how does it make you a creditor of the bought company?

Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#360

Post by ethanholt1 »

I haven’t been to Red Lobster since 2019, and even during that trip the quality of the food was severely degraded from what I remembered it to be. Their garlicky biscuits were quite nice, though. What baffles me about this story is the fact that they’re continuing to sell the endless shrimp, despite the fact that it lost them 11 million dollars. Old habits die hard, I guess.
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