Last week’s Red Lobster shutdown hit home.
My sister, Wendy, along with dozens of other employees working at 48 locations in New York, Texas, Illinois and other parts of the country learned that they were out of jobs.
My sister found out in a telephone call from a manager who showed up for work to find the restaurant on Maple Road in Amherst all locked up.
There were concerns that the chain was heading in the wrong direction financially for several months, however, to say the actual restaurant closures came abruptly would be putting it mildly.
For my sister, a dedicated employee with 44 years of service, it represented a shocking and immediate life change.
Not only was she out of a job, she later learned her health insurance was gone, too.
In classic corporate America fashion, the Red Lobster chain recently gave her an award honoring her decades of dedicated service to the company and its customers.
The award cost $400, she was told.
Her bonus for earning it: Zero.
Don’t worry about her. Our parents raised us to lean into work so she’s already got another job at another local restaurant chain which, hopefully, will treat her better all the way around and really appreciate the hard work the workers do to keep management and shareholders rolling in the dough.
It wasn’t always as bad as it has been at Red Lobster in recent years.
My sister raised her children and paid her monthly bills on her wages. There was a time when she could count on some sizable tip money at a restaurant where the food wasn’t quite fine dining but always had a feel of a cut-above place where you could get a decent steak or lobster at reasonable prices.
We gathered as a family to celebrate a lot of special occasions — birthdays mostly — at that Maple Road location.
Who doesn’t love those buttery Red Lobster biscuits?
So what happened?
My sister saw it all coming and it involved one of the company’s most popular promotions, “Endless Shrimp.”
As various media outlets have reported, the restaurant chain lost big bucks — $3.3 million in seven weeks — in 2003 when it gave away extra helpings of “Endless Crab.”
So what did it do?
Twenty years later, it doubled down, this time on shrimp, making “Endless Shrimp” a regular menu item instead of an occasional promotion. The deal cost Red Lobster’s major shareholder Thai Union, a Bangkok-based canned seafood company, $11 million, according to ABC News.
When the first Red Lobster opened in 1968 in Lakeland, Florida, an hour south of Orlando, casual dining was in its infancy.
The brand was started by southern restaurateurs Bill Darden and Charley Woodsby. Darden owned several Howard Johnson’s restaurants, one of the first casual dining concepts.
“Our motto was informal and family prices,” Woodsby later said. They saw an opportunity to bring seafood to landlocked people at more affordable prices than fine-dining restaurants.
“In most of middle America, you couldn’t get decent seafood. Red Lobster brought it to the masses,” said Jonathan Maze, the editor-in-chief at Restaurant Business Magazine, a trade publication. “Red Lobster was part of this casual dining revolution.”
It’s certainly not always the case, but it seems so often that wherever you find once-promising, locally grown, family-orientated companies that get acquired by corporate giants, the focus gets lost and the core of the product diminished.
It’s a restaurant chain and who cares, right?
Well, for my sister and hundreds of other workers like her, it was a home away from home, a place where you worked and tried to have some pride in something you didn’t own but shared.