This is probably the biggest factor. Cod was the best fish we ever found, and now that the stocks are essentially gone, every other replacement fish is just second-rate, at best. And we don’t have an easy way to farm cod, like we do with cows, so there was no chance to scale up production like McDonald’s did to meet the demand of building thousands of new restaurants. Increasing the scale of your fishing operation just depletes the stocks even faster.
You could have saved yourself time and cut this down to one sentence “WTH putting a slice of American cheese on - not part of God’s plan”.
There, fixed it for ya!
Okay, I know some people like it, more for it’s perfect melting specs than anything else, but for me it’s just 
.
I was going to add this exact point. Yum! (which owns Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut) bought the parent of both Long John Silver’s and A&W in 2002, and that led to a lot of co-branded restaurants.
They then sold off both LJS and A&W in 2011, each to different buyers (led by franchisees in both cases), though some of those older co-branded restaurants are still out there.
The Wikipedia article on Long John Silver’s includes this:
tilapia lower than catfish?
If not lower, then definitely even with. Frankly, I won’t eat either of them. (I never was much of a catfish fan.)
Let’s hope she never finds out how much chicken and cow manure is consumed by potatoes and other vegetables while growing.
Anyway, AFAICT tilapia that are farmed for food have different diets from tilapia that are used for aquatic feces control. You might as well renounce bacon on the grounds that wild pigs eat roadkill.
I don’t care how much shit a fish eats if it tastes good. All the best produce is grown in dirt and shit.
A quick bit of Googling seems to show that the H. Salt that we knew of is still there. Only two Long John Silver’s locations seem to remain in the Sacramento area. I happened to notice, yesterday, driving past where one used to be on Sutterville, that it is no longer there. That location is now a KFC. Apparently, the one in Natomas, where we used to eat fairly frequently, is also now gone.
I love tilapia. Coat a filet with some mayonnaise, drag through breadcrumbs, spray with Pam, then into the air fryer.
I live about half a mile from a LJS, and drive past another one on my way to work (in another town, about 35 minutes away). We also have a Captain D’s in our little town.
I admit that I hit up LJS probably four times a year. It feels like eating your own cardiac death, but sometimes nothing else will do.
I don’t know about the rest of y’all but I ate at Long John Silver’s just four days ago.
Okay, I’ll admit that’s unusual. There are only three Long John Silver’s left in New York. One of them happens to be about twenty-five miles away. So when I’m in Batavia looking for a meal (which I was Saturday) I often go to Long John Silver’s because it’s a rare opportunity.
This was the reason I went to Dixie Lee chicken when I was looking for a meal in Ogdensburg. That was the last Dixie Lee in operation in the entire United States. But it finally gave up the struggle and closed last year.
This! Plus I once dined in a peruvian cuisine restaurant where I had the absolutely most delicious raw fish served in a cheese sauce!
Ivar’s Seafood killed most of the fast food fish and chips places in the Seattle area when they expanded from fancy sit down restaurants and added fast casual restaurants. I live near 2 of them, they are always busy. For those of us older folks, we still remember the goofy commercials of Ivar Haglund, the founder of the restaurants. Keep clam!!!
Ah! I am downtown for a few days and the H Salt over on 16th appears to be open. Maybe I can make it over there. Upon looking at menu pictures, the only things not deep fried appears to be the cole slaw, chowder, and beer - so much crispy brown goodness! It may stretch the statin some, but we’ll see.
Here’s a thread of comments from a reddit post about unsolved mysteries.
Who is going to Long John Silver’s enough to keep them around?
There used to be a place called Tugboat Fish and Chips (part of a local chain) near me that I wondered the same thing about. There never seemed to be any cars in their parking lot. Yet they were in business for many years, in spite of the fact that they never seemed to have any customers that I could see. But eventually that location did go out of business, so maybe it was just a matter of time.
Ironically, it looks like Tugboat Fish and Chips actually still has more locations around the Sacramento area than Long John Silvers. Tugboat has 5 locations, LJS has 2.
Eat Me! 
There are still quite a few fish & chips restaurants around here, but few of them are chains.
There is still a LJS/A&W here, as well. We had a standalone LJS, then they built a new co-branded location sometime in the mid-00s.
I eat there MAYBE once per year. I’m generally not one to be fussed by the potential health effects of my food, but eating LJS nowadays tends to make me feel a bit queasy by the end of it.
When I was a kid, I thought LJS was a fancy restaurant (hey, we were very, very impoverished, and eating out was a huge treat, only happened a few times per year); and the best thing about it was that I could get little tubs of “crunchies”; just the batter-drippings scraped out of the fryer.
They sure don’t taste so good to me nowadays…