What, you mean I need to wear a clean bowling shirt?
I have never been to one but my guess would be they are selling something that not enough people want to buy.
IIRC Olive Garden is currently trying to get itself out of a similar spot. It’s been ages since I last ate at one – actually, I can only think of two OG’s in my state.
There’s one Red Lobster I know of in my state because decent seafood restaurants around here are practically on every corner :waves to Shagnasty: It’s located near an area where there are a few factory outlet stores. We ate there once decades ago, and to this day I still ask myself WHY it exists in this area. Then I think, oh yeah – factory outlet stores = people needing an affordable place to eat.
We had Long John Silver’s in West Texas. I used to say I didn’t care all that much for seafood, because I was raised thinking that’s what seafood was. (We had Red Lobster too, but my folks didn’t go in for those “fancy” places.) Imagine my surprise the first time I had real seafood in San Francisco, then over here.
I agree with this. If I want seafood (or a steak, for that matter), I’ll go to a nicer restaurant because I don’t want to pay for an expensive cut of fish/meat, only to have it ruined by a fast-food chef.
Yep. I’d rather spend a little more and have much better seafood and have a wine list, etc.
I think the quality control and the product buying has declined in the last decade. It’s never been on the top of my list because it’s expensive, but in the past 5 years, it’s moved to the absolute bottom of the list. The shrimp have gotten tinier and rubberier, the lobster tails are so small now I’m fairly certain they’re crawfish on steroids, and three meals in three stores in three states have come to my table with a dehydrated layer of Seafood Jerky on top of my food, because it’s been sitting under a heat lamp far too long before being brought to my table. What can I say, my husband still loves his memories of Red Lobster when it was decent, and I love him, so I keep trying to like Red Lobster. But I’m starting to get a complex that the waitstaff hates me, because mine is *always *dried out, and his doesn’t look that bad.
See, and I quite *like *Long John Silver’s. I’m not a foodie or a restaurant snob. But at least LJS food is fairly freshly out of the fryer, and they charge about half what Red Lobster does (as fits their fast food concept.)
I’m a big steamed crab fan and since they serve a lot of it, they were my go to place for some. Even against the advice of my food snob friends. But it was just steamed crab, and always good.
Then I went one day, and the crab was obviously old and tough. But it could be a one off right? I had a gift certificate for about three dinners, at the time. The second meal, they had stopped giving you heated butter over a candle, now just a side pot of melted butter. Insuring by half way through you’d be having your crab with cold butter. Not so nice.
In addition, they failed to give me crackers, when I asked, they first brought me a nut cracker! And they no longer give you the long skinny implement to help get the little bits!
So, less than the freshest crab, cold melted butter, no, or wrong implements. For the last meal the mussels were ok, but the crab cakes were I edible, I kid you not. And we had very low expectations, by then.
Have not been back since, do not expect to ever return. Why do places insist on ‘improving’ something they already do well?
Sometimes I want crab legs and beer at 9PM on a Sunday night. Here in the Midwest, Red Lobster is really the only option.
I mean, I could buy frozen from the supermarket or even pick up a couple of live suckers from my local old-school fish market, but that requires planning an preparation. Twenty bucks for a couple of pounds of crab legs is actually a pretty good deal in flyover country.
I read an article about their problems recently, but don’t know where. It came down to:
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(As mentioned.) Poor, overpriced food.
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Better alternatives (usually non-chain places).
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The “gap” that is growing in the marketplace. Either you’re a WalMart or a Saks 5th Avenue. With the shrinking middle class, you either cater to the low end or the high end. There is no future in the middle.
Personally, I hate the place because what few seafood dishes I like, they don’t serve or it is extra crappy by even RL standards.
I also used to do online surveys. RL was one of the regulars at the survey site. They would show new menu choices, ads, etc. I’d ding every single one of them as really awful sounding. I mean, they were quite clearly crap. But then they would run the ads, add the items. I think they weren’t doing their market research well.
The meme about Red Lobster’s decline being tied to the supposed decline of the middle class doesn’t fit with the fact that other restaurant chains with middle class clientele are doing quite well. For instance, here are the chains that posted top growth in 2013:
- Zaxby’s
- Little Caesars Pizza
- Moe’s Southwest Grill
- Chipotle Mexican Grill
- Wingstop
- Buffalo Wild Wings Grill & Bar
- Cheddar’s
- Jimmy John’s Gourmet sandwiches
- Firehouse Subs
Those are not high end places, but neither do they cater to the “lower classes”. They obviously are meeting expectations, which Red Lobster is not.
Red Lobster’s pricing puts it in competition with other seafood places that offer much better food at comparable or slighter higher prices (i.e. Bonefish Grill).
I’m not familiar with all the restaurants on your list, but the ones I am familiar with are not sit-down restaurants with table service and they are not in the same price point. I mean, when was the last time you spent $15.99 +tax +tip on a Jimmy John’s sub? or a taco at Moe’s? Chipotle is a cafeteria with a good image, that keeps cost down by having an extremely limited menu (they are the epitome of “do one thing and do it well” that other posters have mentioned as a successful strategy in the modern food marketplace).
As you say, RL’s price point puts them near Bonefish. Except that Bonefish has 10x better quality of everything. <sad trumpets>.
I just read that the price of shrimp is through the roof right now (there’s a shrimp disease going round apparently) and that can’t be helping.
Red Lobster may not be failing. My understanding is that Darden is trying to sell them - they don’t make as much money as Darden would like. They aren’t great coastal restaurants where seafood is better - but they are still pretty popular in the Midwest, where getting seafood without spending an arm and a leg is difficult. Mid sized Mid-West cities (think Fargo, ND) are still ideal locations for a Red Lobster.
My kids enjoy them and we end up there once in a while. They are usually busy by us, do a pretty brisk lunch business, and if they aren’t making money off the traffic they get at the prices they charge for the food quality, they are being mismanaged.
Jackmannii, almost all of the places on your list are relatively new and/or just recently started to expand nationwide. It is common for new franchise chains to start off well and grow for a bit. But they usually don’t sustain growth even in good times. Any such list is going to be misleading about long term success.
The only one I believe that has been around nationally for a while is Little Caesars and it is definitely a budget chain.
Note that the “gap” issue is fairly new. The weaker chains are the ones that are feeling it first. Not all are going to be in significant trouble right away.
(Could be worse. RL could have a lot of mall food court locations. That’s a really bad place to be right now.)
None of those places have ever been considered anything other than “let’s grab a bite” joints. They aren’t post-church service destinations. Who takes the family to Moe’s or Jimmy John’s when Grammy is visiting?
Perhaps this is why Red Lobster is failing. For regular dining-out affairs, people would rather go to a “let’s grab a bite” joint where they don’t have to deal with waitstaff or leaving a tip. “Let’s grab a bite” joints aren’t particularly class-marked. Standing in line at any of these places, you could be a rich dude picking up a “bite” to tide you over till later or you could be a working-class dude picking up dinner for your family of four.
But Red Lobster isn’t as ambiguous as this. If you’re eating at Red Lobster, you’re announcing your class background.
Class-consciousness (and anxiety) have increased, I think. The bad economy has dropped the status of many who were previously “comfortably” middle class. Folks who could eat at Red Lobster without being ashamed, because they had the nice car and the good job to counteract the the low-class stigma associated with the place. But without the nice car and the good job, how do you announce that you’re slumming when you eat there? You can’t. So it’s not that Red Lobster is too expensive for people. It’s that it reminds people of their true status in society in a way that other restaurants do not.
Places like Waffle House and Denny’s will always exist as places where people will “slum”. All you have to do to announce that you’re slumming in these places is to flash a complete set of teeth. People like my folks eat at Golden Corral just so they can “people watch”–a nice way of saying, “Let’s make fun of the tacky poor people while we guzzle down all this cheap food!” As long as you’re laughing at the tacky poor people around you, then you aren’t one of them. So really “low brow” places will always have a market.
A couple of comments:
Is no one going to stand up and defend Red Lobster? I don’t go often but when I have I always got a good meal with good service. I like it.
The fact that the middle class is disappearing isn’t a “meme”. It’s a fact that many economic statistics will attest to. It’s also the the designed result of the economic policies begun under Reagan and continued under every President since then but that is a tangent not exactly on topic.
When I was a kid (think Christmas Story) Red Lobster had the luxury of being one of a very few if not the only sea food chain in town. It was a “special occasion” place to go. It is now a very small fish in a very big pond. The economy is still in the tank so there is less money chasing more businesses. And as been pointed out the older RL’s are now in less than desirable parts of town. I can think of at least one in my area that was near a very successful mall that has since been torn down and the surrounding stores have been closing. It’s like it was economically nuked and all that’s left are zombie stores. This was once the hub of commerce for multiple counties surrounding it.
I go to the one in Reno if we have coupons;). For lunch you can get things for under 10 bucks. It’s ok , not great, but at lunch there are plenty of senior citizens eating there.
Is everybody just gonna leave me hanging? What is it?
Oh no, they got that. They just couldn’t pass an opportunity to jump on the hurr durr I hate chains circlefuck.
haven’t been there in 14 years. Use to go with my mother often before she passed away. I always liked it. But I can go to another chain and get a steak, really tasty rolls, salad, and baked potato for $10 that is very satisfying. I’m one of the middle class that disappeared. What little money I have has been diverted into higher insurance premiums. If the predicted increases occur next year then the discretionary income of the middle class will shrink.