The fishy death of Red Lobster

Overpriced bad food? Bingo!

Very tangential to the quality of chain restaurants that have decline in quality:

I'm from the US, but on the Canadian border, and Timmy's was the dominant coffee shop growing up. Even if you didn't drink coffee, that was the hang out.

We had a Dunkin that was probably less than 100 meters away from it that had a fire and never reopened. I definitely think it was a ploy for insurance money because they never had _any_ business. Tim Horton's dominated.

Then something happened around 2017 and their coffee became awful (it was never incredible, but it got much worse). Then their prices began to rise significantly. Whenever I go home, I get a cup of Timmy's coffee, but it's never good.

Turns out having nostalgia for a large food company doesn't play well in the long run. I'm sure the same applies to Red Lobster, but those kinds of places become part of your memories growing up and you want them to do well, maybe as a way of preserving those memories. Probably half of my friends and I had their first dates at Tim Horton's growing up. As much as I wish I didn't feel the need to drink their swill a few times a year, there's something that still draws me.

> I went to red lobster in Toronto yesterday...Worse than mediocre rubber for $200 after tip and tax...Came out thinking: let em burn.

My homeless ex wanted RL for her bday last year. All of us and the families took her there for dinner. For me it was comparable to Walmart canned and frozen. She was happy enough with it but then she fixates on things.

I had a really bad dining experience the one single time I went to Red Lobster; happened at the same place probably (Toronto, the one in Bay Street?) hence why I want to share.

I came in to the restaurant and there was no one at the front desk, but the place seemed to be operating normally so I just went on to seat at the nearest table I found. Waiters just started ignoring me; at some point I realized this was on purpose. Wtf.

Anyway, after like 20 mins. I stand up and ask one of the guys "what's going on?". He tells me that they knew I was there (!) but decided to ignore me because no one "seated me at that place". I tell him, well, do that now ... the guy just tells me they don't want to do that anymore because I should've done it when I entered the restaurant, then just like that asks me to leave the place (wtf x2).

I tell him that's ridiculous and he just says "I'm calling security" and walks away. After a few minutes, two huge guys come to my table and ask me what the problem is (they were actually quite polite). I tell them, I just walked into the restaurant, sat here, and just want to order something. They look at each other a bit confused (who knows what the waiter told them), ask me if that's it, "yes", ..., "ok, wait here a bit". After another like 10 mins., a different waiter comes up and starts catering to me.

Everything was normal afterwards, but that was super weird. Imagine getting beat up for walking into a restaurant and wanting to get some food.

Needless to say I never came back as the food turned out to be quite average, definitely not worth fighting for it, lol.

It's unclear to me how much is private equity "ruining" the business and how much is making it visible. Here in Portland a private equity firm bought a bunch of local restaurants and mini chains during the pandemic. Now they struggle paying workers and rent and are closing a lot of these businesses. My suspicion is that they bought these businesses when they were distressed and otherwise wouldn't have survived at all. Now the pandemic recovery here has been famously bad and these businesses aren't recovering. I suspect the play here was to buy for cheap, help them through the pandemic and have a bunch of guys businesses. Honestly everyone would IMO have been a winner. Employees, customers, investors and even the founders who lost their business but at least got done money for it and see it continue. I don't think we can blame this particular private equity firm in this situation. As a customer the transition was not noticeable.

How many private equity acquisitions are like this but circumstances are less obvious and the measurers to rescue need to be more involved than just waiting for a pandemic to end? I genuinely don't know. But I suspect that it's very easy, looking in from the outside as a customer, to come to the conclusion that the business went bad when private equity came in when the business was already struggling but prior leadership was avoiding dramatic changes.