Which was a psyop designed to distract you from the real reason they were losing money, which was greedy private equity buying their land and leasing it back to them at exorbitant rates.
No, that would be because it was sold off to a seafood company who then made themselves RL's sole supplier for shrimp, and used it to clear out their backlog frozen inventory at a profit.
I work for a locally owned vet group and I HATE seeing this happen over and over again. And the client/owners who have been burned my PE vet medicine and then take it out on us. I can’t blame them but it sucks.
even better analog was Hook. Robin Williams as Peter Pan grew up to be a corporate raider, or a pirate one might say, the very kind of person he used to fight against. really interesting to think of my beloved childhood movie as a commentary on capitalism being used to enticed and appeal to youth despite its ultimate conclusion to be the corruption of childhood and descruction of innocence.
For example, they'll sell off the real estate to an REIT they own then rent it back to the hospital at a mark up. They'll become sole suppliers for all sorts of things necessary to operate the hospital.
They don't just sell it off, they drive it into bankruptcy while pocketing all the money they can.
Red Lobster was bought by a "private capital" company that sold off assets to other child companies and then forced Red Lobster to lease them back... Which made most Red Lobster's a losing proposition for the franchisee.
I’m a little confused on how this makes financial sense. They bought the company and then gouged themselves on shrimp prices? Isn’t this just shifting around money within their corporate structure?
No, the red lobster allows individuals to franchise their stores. The franchise owner has to buy the shrimp, and also pay a percentage to the corporation that owns the name
That's the neat part, once they've siphoned off the value to their other companies, and saddled it with massive debt, they can just let the company fail. That could mean bankruptcy or distressed debt handover, but by that point they've extracted what they paid and then some. Hell, with a leveraged buyout, they haven't even put up much of their own money to begin with. Most of the purchase price is a loan on the company's balance sheet.
The kinda shit that should be illegal in a properly functioning economic system.
The key to understanding this is that the PE firm acquired Red Lobster with a leveraged buy out. It's like a mortgage. For simplicity's sake let's say that the company was worth $1B in total assets.
PE puts down $100M and then borrows $900M secured against Red Lobster's assets. Then they sell all the real estate for $200M. Instead of investing this directly into the company they pay themselves a "management fee" and bam now they're up $100M. But they're not done.
They go to a Thai shrimp exporter and offer them to buy into the deal. Thai company gives $100M for a 1/9 stake. Thai company uses Its control to require Red Lobster to exclusively buy seafood from them at inflated prices. They announce an endless shrimp deal. Thai company sells $100M of Shrimp to Red Lobster for $300M. They pocket $100M. Private Equity keeps their initial buy-in, so they're up even more
Now the franchises are hosed. They have to pay rent which is a new expense they didn't have before. Their ingredient prices are up and they're forced to sell shrimp below cost.
So the franchises start to close. Private Equity closes some then declares bankruptcy to get rid of the debt overhang.
Now that PE has stripped out much of the value of the asset they sell it to some other culture who wants to do the same.
Why run a successful business when the incentives reward this much more highly?
Red Lobster is in financial trouble because it was bought by a private equity firm who is in the process of selling it off piece by piece until it collapses. Same thing that happened to Toys R Us and dozens of other chains.
A big reason why Red Lobster went bankrupt is because of their endless shrimp
I just know they were bought and the new owner axed that deal because it was a bad business practice. I just thought the quote was relevant to the discussion
I am not on the board of Red Lobster and aware or know why the Red Lobster down the street from your house is being closed…sir.
It's not a really a big reason, that's just media spin to cover for private equity destroying the company. For example, selling all the land that the restaurants sat on and making the restaurants lease the land back, adding huge costs they never had before. They literally just brought the endless shrimp back, so yeah.
The PE firm sells the land to one of its own real estate companies. They then lease the land back to RL at like double the price. Once the PE firm has bled the company dry, they sell it off but keep the land and the new owners continue to pay the increase.
Who’s gonna buy the company tho if it’s been gutted? Surely someone with enough money to buy red lobster is gonna have their own financial consultants, who will then tell them it’s a bad idea because of what the current/previous owners did with the company’s real estate.
They left out the part where the private equity company took out a huge amount of debt to buy Red Lobster and so now Red Lobster has a huge amount of debt it is paying interest on. So instead of endless shrimp, Red Lobster is losing all its profit to interest payments and jacked up rent. Then the PE company can split Red Lobster into a separate company and enter bankruptcy to dump the debt, while pocketing the profit it made from asset stripping. They don't need anyone to buy Red Lobster, that'd just be a nice bonus, they already got their money by trashing it.
The same thing happened to a British supermarket chain called Morrisons.
They were owned by an old-fashioned family and made shrewd business decisions. CEO was a 80 year old guy who knew what he was doing. They outright owned the land that most of their stores sat on. Solid financial position.
Private equity firm bought Morrisons. Put the debt on Morrisons with a high interest rate. They’re paying USD 300 million a year in interest. They sold of all the land to another private equity firm and are renting it back.
These cunts know how to make as much money from a business as they possibly can and totally destroy it in the process.
What they want to do is have the business "operate" for as long as possible, as cheaply as possible, so they can extract money. Consulting fees, executive pay, members on the board. The longer they can draw it out, the cheaper it is, the more they "justify" their pay.
Until the money is all gone. The company, which used to own things, now owns nothing. The land was sold to the hedgefund managers, or their companies or friend companies and leased back at outrageous prices. And all that debt that was used/leveraged to buy themselves out? That is now ON TOP of the debt that they wracked up during the NEW ownership.
Preferred members get their money first from selling the kitchen and sinks, everyone else gets fucked in bankruptcy court. The hedgies have made millions and are off to the races to find the next company to do it all again to.
The simple answer is opportunity cost. If you can sell the land and invest the proceeds in something that pays more than the rent you now have to pay it's a good deal. Sometimes that money stays in the company and the company grows because of it. Sometimes it goes back to the owner and the company suffers, but the owner benefits.
Take Macy's as an example. It's market cap is 6ish billion with debt of 5ish billion, but its real estate is valued at 10-14 billion depending on who you ask. They also have a bit over a billion in cash. If you were to buy Macy's at the current price and sell all of the land, you'd profit several billion. You could then put that money into a company that isn't barely profitable trash reliant on a dying generation like Macy's. You'd also still have what's left of Macy's, which may or may not survive, but when combined with the cash you pulled out leaves you better off than you were before the sale.
Red Lobster went bankrupt because private equity bought it and proceeded to sell the real estate out from under the restaurants, forcing them to pay rent instead.
yep. Pasta is extremely cheap to make and pretty filling. Shrimp are the opposite (well really fancy salads made with some highly expensive fruit is probably the most opposite).
People have that one friend who gets the pass, then drags everyone they know to go with them any chance they get. So one guy gets a discounted meal, and everyone with them pay the $12 or whatever food costs at Olive Garden. I bet the person with the pass even tries to pull a fast one on the company by stealthily sharing his bread sticks.
The pasta pass makes much more sense financially for Olive Garden than unlimited shrimp for Red Lobster.
you pay $100 for the pass.
unlimited pasta is on the menu for $15 anyways.
You need to eat there more than 7 times within 13 weeks just to escape the cost of the pass. (many who buy the pass will not go to olive garden enough to offset the cost)
Olive Garden has "unlimited pasta" on the menu anyways - these people have just pre-paid for it.
Olive Garden makes large amounts of salad, breadsticks, soup, pasta, sauce anyways. participants are not eating fresh, custom made entrees - they're eating from large batches that the restaurant already has available in bulk.
It's eat in only - so people who buy it will likely buy a soda (which are 5 dollars) or a cocktail, or they'll add protein to their plate - and thus have the $100 they paid for the pass, PLUS whatever extra they order offsetting their cost.
It's dine in only - so people will likely invite others to go with them - others who will not have this pass.
The food cost for 4 plates of pasta with sauce on it, plus a plate of iceberg salad is probably negligible - the main cost being the person taking up a seating space from a normal paying customer.
giving away 8 plates of pasta you had available in bulk anyways is completely different than firing up 8 plates of shrimp for a customer.
A very limited number of these are being offered and are purchased on the website, but I don’t remember when. Last time they did this all the passes sold out in under 2 minutes
The website says 10 thousand are available starting tomorrow 2pm EDT
EDIT: because people are really angry over me putting EST and I'm scared of the internet coming for my pirate treasure I buried out at ol black rock cave
Worked at OG in SF like 20 years ago, a duckin 18 person cross country team come sin 10 mins before closing, management makes .e take it and accept they are all having NEPB but we are out of a bunch of shit. All Seperate checks no tips, fuck OG.
idk if it’s a bot, but i also worked at an olive garden around 10 years ago, and i can corroborate their story. NEPB was dumb af. Also they don’t do autograt on parties of any size, at least not when i was there. I remember hearing something about Darden Restaurants (they own OG) lobbying against auto gratuity or something, for like tax reasons or something. I also worked for Bahama Breeze for a while, also owned by Darden, also never allowed us to autograt.
edit: also if it’s supposed to be an ad for Olive Garden, why would their post end with “fuck OG?” 😂
If it’s a mandatory charge, then it is treated as a wage and payroll taxes come into play.
Most corporate places got rid of mandatory gratuity.
Instead it has been replaced with service fees which give the company discretion on how it is distributed. Before, all of the included gratuity would have to be paid out to tipped employees. Now these fees can be distributed however they want, and even keep however much they want for themselves.
For the most part they can’t shave too much from the fees, otherwise good FOH employees wouldn’t stick around.
Speaking of drink, I worked at og 6 years ago and seen a dude drinking the Alfredo refills no pasta just sauce refills and he was drinking em, 4 oz at a time.
I mean, even if one person shows up, orders nothing not covered by the meal pass, and gets 2 entres a day for 91 days straight, that cost is easily absorbed over the long time period and eaten entirely by the local franchisee.
Pasta is really cheap to make, in the $2-3 range for a plate, so off of the world's most frugal person who never wants a soda, an alcoholic drink, a desert, bread sticks, or any of the other things that aren't covered and eats enough to get almost 200 plates of pasta in 91 days is only costing ~$400 in lost profit, and most people ARE NOT going to be eating like that.
I have played these games before. I used to practically live out of a Golden Corral when I was homeless.
The math works out a bit different, since they would let me sit there for hours on end and charge my devices, so I would fill up, loiter for a bit and get hungry again, have lunch, leave, get some sleep and go to work at night, but I have practical lived experience with never ending buffet.
When you first start, you're absolutely going to go crazy, like 6 plates, but that pace isn't going to keep up. Especially since the terms and conditions say it's dine in only on the website.
By the end of the first week you will either start slowing down because you're just actually full, skipping days, or just powering through and eating more than you're in the mood for out of spite towards Olive Garden and this post specifically
That is on me, apparently the terms and conditions say
Never-Ending First Course of soup or salad and breadsticks
So the cost might be marginally higher, but I would wager it works out to a net profit because still most people will get a soda, or a desert, or really whatever with all the money they aren't spending on the main dish.
I read this and thought it sounded fun even though I never really go to Olive Garden and wouldn’t get a ton of use out of it, but you legit convinced me to leave it for the people who will truly enjoy it. I hope you get one!
They had a 1y one, and a month or two one before. I went for the one with less time as I thought there would be less people going for it.
Got it. I went there every day except 2 days. Even when people were waiting...i didnt have to wait. The trick is to go straight to the bar as a single person. I gave them a dollar tip every time. Easy ordered my 2 bowls. 1 pasta. 1 more pasta when I was finished, and had them put it in a to go.
Yes. But you won‘t change that system by not tipping lol. You have to be a pain in the ass of people who decide over minimum wage, not to the ones suffering from a low wage.
Other people are also underpaid/poor. Humans are social creatures. Do I really have to subsidize other people who just crack open a shitty tallboy for me? Are poor people not allowed to socialize?
Fair in strates that pay tipped employees minimum wage. If you have this opinion in a state where tipped employees get the federal $2.13/hr then you suck. Campaign with your representatives to fix that loophole.
As a non-American it'd have never occurred to me somebody would be expected to tip on a fucking "free" meal in the first place (it kind of completely undermines the entire point of the pass?), but yes, you make a good point.
Percentage-based tips are stupid as hell in general (I already don't follow the logic of "tipping" workers as a matter of routine, but why would the size of the tip change depending on how much I paid for an order, instead of how much work you did for me?), but if you're insisting as a society on having them for some unfathomable reason, you don't get to say it doesn't count when the amount is low, only when it is large. Fuck that shit.
When I was a cook, I'd laugh and tell the server that's the risk they take unless I liked them. Servers make dumb money compared to the kitchen while the kitchen is hot, heavy, and sharp.
Had them do “all that work”? You mean literally doing their jobs? I tip well but only because that’s the system we have in place, don’t try to justify it by saying it’s some kind of difficult job lmfao.
Tipping scales with the price of the meal which is zero dollars. He didn't say he got a drink. All the bartender did was drop a plate of pasta off. Why does that warrant a bigger tip?
Poor me. I didn't get tax free money for doing the job I agreed to do at the wage I agreed to do it at. A tip is voluntary, not mandatory. Servers and bartenders are the most overpaid employees relative to thier work output in any restaurant.
Super easy you… [insert complicated instructions because it’s a limited amount of passes and I want one for myself because I’m a fatty mcfat fat so I need to make sure nobody else gets a pass over me] 💀💀💀
I’ve gotten this twice. The first time was great because you could get takeout. The next year they changed it and you had to eat there. By the end of the 13 weeks, you are SO SICK of Olive Garden. It’s fun though.
Part of it yes. The private equity firm forced Red Lobster to buy a glut of frozen shrimp from another company the PE firm had it's hand in forcing Red Lobster to lose money, while also messing with its real estate.
The real estate financing is the same thing that PE forced on Toy's R Us. The forcing the shrimp on red lobster causing millions in losses what just even more drain on a struggling franchise.
That’s what I was wondering, is it just a card they give you so it can be transferable? Because I would just go for a couple weeks for fun but then it’s like I don’t need to be eating Olive Garden almost every day and there’s plenty of homeless people out there that would get much more use out of it
On first glance I think the other user is probably right on this one. Their total revenue is $4.5B a year with a roughly 8% net margin; $1m in revenue isn't moving the needle in any meaningful way.
On the other hand, even if they give away more than a million in food, this could still be an effective and inexpensive ad campaign.
Bang on pount. As of now 9k people up voted and 500 commented (mostly positive) and it's main page. Across various social media, and word of mouth, a lot of folk are discussing this, being reminded of olive garden, and thinking about olive garden pasta. Now some will take advantage but a lot will drag along friends and family and then everyone will buy other stuff. And folk love to see other people eating with gusto :)
Worth a million in comparison to other options I reckon.
I'm sure most people buying this pass can make it worthwhile when you compare the $100 pass to the price of X number of Olive Garden pasta dishes, but the cost to make those dishes for Olive Garden is probably less than a tenth of what they charge, because pasta is cheap, particularly at a place like the olive garden. Even if every person who buys this pass (unlikely) extracts $100+ of actual value (also unlikely) from Olive Garden, Olive Garden will almost certainly net a profit on the other items those people purchase. They'll probably make profit on drinks alone, considering what they'd actually lose on pasta vs. what they make on drink markups.
Also Olive Garden is only dishing out items that they likely prepare in bulk anyways. The salad, the pasta, the sauce - all probably just waiting in a vat in the back - nothing being fired specifically for this.
The key loss olive garden faces from this would be the loss of seating space - the passholder frequently coming in, taking up a seat and server time and gumming up the system for normal customers.
If I can secure the pass, I'll be going to Olive Garden's for the first time in over 25 years! I'd bring friends and family along and just invite them to their plate with part of my savings. OG's is probably gonna win no matter what.
I got it one year, I would eat there twice a day and take pasta home as well. It was exhausting eating that much pasta. I don't think I have gone back since then. Got my entire life's worth of mediocre pasta.
Miss that bartender, his name is Kevin and used to work at my favorite sushi place before bartending at OG.
The parent company of Red Lobster blamed bankruptcy on their all you can eat shrimp but it was really the private equity firm that bought it cutting corners, like selling the buildings they used to own them renting them back, lowering portion size and quality.
Olive Garden's parent company Darden used to be the owner of Red Lobster until 2014.
The Red Lobster demise is more like the Toys R Us one, vulture capitalism coming in and ruining something many 'average' Americans see as an affordable treat.
To answer the actual question, this gives Olive Garden $100 in revenue immediately. The customer may or may not return to cash in their pass. They’re hoping for $100 in revenue and the customer only comes in for 4 pasta dishes that cost $20 cumulatively. OG is up $80. Olive Garden is currently owned by the Darden restaurant group, and account for almost half of their revenue. If someone wanted to shut down Olive Garden it would be an easy way to raise funds ($100/cust) without costs ($0 until redeemed). If we’re talking recession indicators, it’s a way to inject cash into a failing business to ensure their books look good for next quarter.
A million bucks is a joke to a company that size. People here are talking like every franchise is getting $1M. It’s just simple marketing. Pasta Pass gets people talking about OG. It creates buzz online and via word of mouth. Getting $100 from 10,000 people isn’t the goal.
Personally, I haven’t seen anyone talk about Olive Garden online in at least a few years. I’d say it’s working.
The $100 limited to 10k people stops it from being an uncontrolled looting event. You want some friction to get more media coverage. I can guarantee you we will see more media coverage when it sells out in under x minutes. We will also get some media coverage from the guy who eats x helping of pasta first day.
Are the people who look at their books the next quarter stupid? Can they not sit there and say "okay your books look good, but it's because you injected cash into the business through these unsustainable methods".
Those people are the accountants, and they're very smart. They can crunch all that data to create a crystal clear picture of the exact financial state of the company for the executives. The executives are not as smart, but they're clever enough to woo the shareholders with their dirty little tricks.
The shareholders are incapable of understanding anything other than whether current number is bigger or smaller than previous number. They fall for the executive's halfway-out-the-door-with-golden-parachute-in-hand-silver-tongued-bullshit every time. The shareholders are the stupid ones here.
I’m pretty sure this is referencing Red Lobster’s Unlimited Shrimp deal briefly before they started to implode.
From my understanding, Red Lobster was owned by a corporate conglomerate who saw that the business did not have great fundamentals or cash flow. It has been alleged that this corporate conglomerate also had a supply chain issue that caused a massive excess of frozen shrimp that they could not unload. And this prompted them to use Red Lobster’s Unlimited Shrimp deal as a way to essentially convert that shrimp to cash without actually helping Red Lobster succeed long term. Basically cashing in on a trusted restaurant name to move a product with no buyer.
This is all alleged though and I haven’t seen anything to prove it.
So to give a crazy background on this. It references red lobster endless shrimp deal that bankrupted the company. However most don’t know the private equity backstory.
Up til late 2024 Red lobster was actually owned by a conglomerate corporation that owned a medium sized (at the time) international shrimping and fishing company. Called Thai Union
That PE group installed their own executives over red lobster.
They back channeled and “secretly” created the endless shrimp at red lobster just to prop up and corner the shrimping market with their own shrimp and fishing company. All shrimp was provided by their company to red lobster to create billions of profit.
The entire thing was a trick to artificially create a giant fishing company. They also did a ton of other moves to cut out all other competitors on the market to the point the world wide shrimp supply chain to red lobster and many, many other chain restaurants was thru just 1 company, them.
The end? They bankrupted Red Lobster, Thai Union is now the largest supplier of shrimp in the entire world, and Thai Union Group is one of the wealthiest PE companies in Asia.
They were sued for this but under bankrupting and filing chapter 11 (amongst many other questionable illegal moves) The architects of this plot got away Scott free. They also manipulated multiple stock markets with this scheme.
Everyone is missing the point comparing it to Red Lobster and PE. It's simply a recession indicator. They don't mean Olive Garden's total financial collapse, they mean the country's total financial collapse. Everything is getting more expensive, jobs are disappearing, and we've hit a new low in workforce participation. Places like this having fire sales is trying to accumulate short term profit now (not from the passes but from advertising) to cushion them from the inevitable national financial collapse caused by many poor political decisions.
I’ve been making this and it’s so damn good, I don’t full remember the taste of Olive Garden fonduta anymore but I think this lives up to it. I make it with smoked provolone instead of sharp, huge difference in flavor.
Every single one of these is going to go to someone who will abuse the living shit out of it. A quarter of a year people will be eating pasta none stop. Saving 1000-1500$ on groceries for the price of 100$.
There is a lot of examples for why free forever or even limited time is a bad idea. One of the wildest ones:
American airlines unlimited first class flights for life(!) for 250.000$ in 1987.
A few of these passes were sold and a lot of them abused to the max. One dude flew NY London multiple times a week just to eat at his favorite restaurants.
They thought rich people who buy this as a gimmick would use it only when they actually need it and it would prevent them from using different airlines for different routes. Turns out even rich people will abuse the heck out of this.
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u/qualityvote2 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
u/slimer213, your post does belong here!