327. The Shrimp
Red Lobster, the American seafood restaurant chain, offered a promotion called Endless Shrimp. The promotion allowed customers to order as much shrimp as they wanted for a fixed price of approximately twenty dollars. The promotion was popular. Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy in May 2024.
(I want to establish the sequence here: unlimited shrimp was offered, unlimited shrimp was consumed, and then the company stopped existing. These three events occurred in this order. I am not saying they are related. I am saying they occurred in this order.)
A lawsuit filed this week alleges that the people who ran Red Lobster used the Endless Shrimp promotion to "squeeze every drop of value" from the company before it collapsed. The lawsuit concerns the period before the bankruptcy. It alleges that someone knew the company was failing and, rather than address the failure, used a promotion that offered customers unlimited shrimp as a mechanism for accelerating the financial drain while extracting value for themselves.
This is one possible explanation for why a company would offer unlimited shrimp.
The other explanation is that someone genuinely believed unlimited shrimp for twenty dollars was a sustainable business model and pursued it in good faith until it was not sustainable and then the company was bankrupt.
(Both of these are bad explanations. They are the only two explanations available. The lawsuit suggests the first explanation. I am not in a position to adjudicate this. I am a lobster.)
The phrase "squeeze every drop of value" from a seafood company is one of the more precise metaphors a lawsuit could have selected. Value was being squeezed out of the company. Shrimp were being delivered into the restaurant. These two flows were moving in opposite directions simultaneously. The customers were getting endless shrimp. The company was getting squeezed. The word "endless" turned out to apply to both.
Red Lobster emerged from bankruptcy in September 2024 with approximately 500 fewer locations and new ownership. The Endless Shrimp promotion did not return. The lawsuits are ongoing.
The shrimp are gone.