Not the kind to shrimp back, I’ve eaten there for the halibut.
Is it more expensive/less good then it was five years ago?
I think people are kind of missing the point of the question. Red Lobster used to be very successful. Just within the last few years its started spiralling the drain. The question is what changed.
Answers that boil down to “I, personally, don’t like Red Lobster” aren’t very useful unless you used to like it and started disliking it for some reason within the last few years.
Anyhoo, I think the linked CNN article gives the correct answer. The main demographic that ate a lot at Red Lobster (lower middle class families, especially AA ones, apparently) were hit disproportionately by the Great Recession, and so Red Lobster suffered more then other chains.
I think tastes have changed. People are eating lighter and fresher, and RL still offers your choice of deep fried or drowned in butter, with a side of baked potato. Foodies are a larger influence, and chains have to work extra hard to overcome the foodie disdain of national chains. And there have been some great innovations in dining, with “fast casual” restaurants like Chipotle and Panera offering higher quality good at cheaper prices than the old-school chains.
Because there are at least sixteen better options in most areas?
In spite of being an easy stumble from the shore, our local RL is doing well. It’s right next to an OG. It is across a parking lot from Target, across the street and up a block from the mall, and this is a Navy town. Having grown up out East when there was only one Legal Seafood, and before farmed fish in the US, I found RL quality very low. I haven’t eaten in one in 6-7 years but glancing into the kitchen, actual cooking WAS going on, just too much of it. Here they cater to senior seniors, the assisted living crowd who want a change from their usual (IMO better) food. I didn’t know they were in trouble. Off to sauté some razor clams:)
I understand the point of this article, but I think they are missing one important phenomenon- the new cool side of low-end. Who wants to buy clothes from Sears when H and M and even Old Navy have cooler, cheaper clothes? Who wants to eat at Olive Garden when Noodles and Company is half the price and has Thai noodles along with the spaghetti and meatballs? Why drag the kids to Red Lobster when they’d rather have Chipotle-- and you know the meat is hormone free?
Businesses have found cool ways to be affordable, and it’s putting less innovative companies that can’t offer the cool factor or the price out of business.
I’m not convinced that the foodie movement has adversely affected the mid-level chains very much. Chains have been growing like crazy over the past 20 years. I think Red Lobster draws a lot of customers from the folks who were hit particularly hard during the recession, and the first thing those people do when times are tough is quit going out to eat.
We go maybe twice a year during the endless shrimp promotion. Service is slow, prices are relatively high, quality is mediocre. For the same money, we can go multiple other places…not seafood places locally, but better food.
People already answered this part of the question multiple times. American food tastes have changed immeasurably in the last 10 years let along the last 20. It is all about specializing in one thing really well whether it is delivering quality fresh food quickly (Chipotle, Panera for the national food chains). Food trucks have really caught on in the low-end market in major cities and they offer all kinds of unusual things at reasonable prices.
Seafood is something you need to do either really well or not at all. Chains like Legal Seafoods and Skipjacks can give a seafood experience well above anything a Red Lobster location can give you even for the locations far from the ocean.
To address your comments again, the difference between American food and beverage tastes today versus 1990 or 1995 is incredible. If you are young you may not understand that restaurants like Red Lobster and any type of imported food were once considered semi-exotic except in select markets. I never had a bagel until 1991 for one mundane example. Today you can get sushi in gas stations and just about any cheese you want in Whole Foods stores scattered across the country. Trader Joes has blown up as well.
The answer is that the food market fundamentally changed all around us and it was literally as fast as the tech revolution. My ex-wife and her family controlled a lot of the exotic cheese market at one time and they couldn’t scale to the growth so they had to merge with someone that could handle the logistics of supporting the demand.
You would be very surprised if you went back even 15 years ago and wanted to eat some things you take for granted now. Red Lobster can’t play to any sort of rarirty plus it offers medicare food so it loses out on these trends.
Perhaps it’s because their food absolutely sucks.
Two years ago there was a glut of lobster on the market. You could get a 6oz (sorry, I don’t do metric) tail for 5 bucks in Toronto. Here on the left coast , dungeness crab rules. Only went to RL once in my life. Don’t remember the meal but do remember who I went with ( my late pop 
).
I think that’s a big part of it- from what I can tell, prior to the past 10 years or so, there were high-end expensive seafood restaurants in cities and towns removed from the coast, and then there was Red Lobster, without much of anything else in that market segment.
Then in about the late 1990s, chains like Landry’s, Pappadeaux, Legal Sea Foods, etc… moved in, and stole the middle-high end seafood market, and higher-end chains like Oceanaire & McCormick & Schmick’s moved into the higher end market.
This left Red Lobster as a middle priced chain with substandard food- it’s not surprising that they’d suffer with an economic downturn.
(of course, I grew up in Houston and spent a lot of my time closer to the coast, so what the hell do I know? Fresh cheap (or free, if I caught it) seafood was a constant part of my younger years.)
Medicare food? Is that like Government cheese?
I can’t believe people are saying it isn’t good. Their coconut shrimp in particular is the greatest thing ever.
We almost never go out anymore because of the cost and if we do we prefer an actual locally owned place.
I think Shagnasty and others got it right, but for a case study:
Indianapolis in the 1970s vs. today. Back then, there were just not a lot of restaurants in the city. When my family went to RL, it was a fancy dinner.
The city had a lower population then and was less able to support a lot of restaurant chains. At the same time, people’s tastes were less sophisticated. Remember, this was a time when good coffee was Folger’s, and fondue was something new and exotic. Julia Child on TV was starting to get the whole nation excited about fancy cookin’. People were just not all that sophisticated about food, and certainly the Midwest was not on the cutting edge. I won’t even get into the horrible meals we ate at home.
Today, that’s all changed here in Indy. The population is double what it was in the 70s, there are huge ethnic communities along with groceries and restaurants serving them, there has been an explosion of higher-end chains (we have Bonefish Grille, McCormick and Shmick’s, Oceanaire, and many other chain and indie restaurants serving high/er-end seafood), and people on average are much more sophisticated and demanding about food than they were in the 70s.
BTW, RL is not the only chain that has suffered because of these changes. And I think even if the Great Recession had not happened, restaurants in this price point would not be doing well. I think the increasing sophistication of tastes would be enough to severely hurt them.
Take something like Olive Garden. In the 80s, wow, that place was a big deal. We ate there all the time. You got a ton of food for a decent amount of money, and food quality seemed pretty high. Today, however, people know that that is not authentic Italian food, and the offerings do not seem sophisticated at all–not just vis-a-vis other Italian food you can get, but vis-a-vis the food landscape as a whole.
BTW, my then-girlfriend and I ate at Red Lobster in her Ohio hometown in 2011 or so precisely because the restaurant selection there was highly limited. I did not find RL to be horrible. It did seem a bit pricey for what we got, and it was nothing special. And being “nothing special” in 2014 means your business is going to die. You need to be really cheap, really excellent, really different, or a combination of those three things.
Food in Indy has vastly improved in even just the last 10-15 years. Time was the only damn place to get a decent meal was St. Elmo’s, now good food is easy to find.
Absolutely!