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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months ago

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Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

A decade ago, a hedge fund had an improbable viral comedy hit: a 294-page slide deck explaining why Olive Garden was going out of business, blaming the failure on too many breadsticks and insufficiently salted pasta-water:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/940944/000092189514002031/ex991dfan14a06297125_091114.pdf

Everyone loved this story. As David Dayen wrote for Salon, it let readers "mock that silly chain restaurant they remember from their childhoods in the suburbs" and laugh at "the silly hedge fund that took the time to write the world’s worst review":

https://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/the_real_olive_garden_scandal_why_greedy_hedge_funders_suddenly_care_so_much_about_breadsticks/

But – as Dayen wrote at the time, the hedge fund that produced that slide deck, Starboard Value, was not motivated by dissatisfaction with bread-sticks. They were "activist investors" (finspeak for "rapacious assholes") with a giant stake in Darden Restaurants, Olive Garden's parent company. They wanted Darden to liquidate all of Olive Garden's real-estate holdings and declare a one-off dividend that would net investors a billion dollars, while literally yanking the floor out from beneath Olive Garden, converting it from owner to tenant, subject to rent-shocks and other nasty surprises.

They wanted to asset-strip the company, in other words ("asset strip" is what they call it in hedge-fund land; the mafia calls it a "bust-out," famous to anyone who watched the twenty-third episode of The Sopranos):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out

Starboard didn't have enough money to force the sale, but they had recently engineered the CEO's ouster. The giant slide-deck making fun of Olive Garden's food was just a PR campaign to help it sell the bust-out by creating a narrative that they were being activists* to save this badly managed disaster of a restaurant chain.

*assholes

Starboard was bent on eviscerating Darden like a couple of entrail-maddened dogs in an elk carcass:

https://web.archive.org/web/20051220005944/http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~solan/dogsinelk/

They had forced Darden to sell off another of its holdings, Red Lobster, to a hedge-fund called Golden Gate Capital. Golden Gate flogged all of Red Lobster's real estate holdings for $2.1 billion the same day, then pissed it all away on dividends to its shareholders, including Starboard. The new landlords, a Real Estate Investment Trust, proceeded to charge so much for rent on those buildings Red Lobster just flogged that the company's net earnings immediately dropped by half.

Dayen ends his piece with these prophetic words:

Olive Garden and Red Lobster may not be destinations for hipster Internet journalists, and they have seen revenue declines amid stagnant middle-class wages and increased competition. But they are still profitable businesses. Thousands of Americans work there. Why should they be bled dry by predatory investors in the name of “shareholder value”? What of the value of worker productivity instead of the financial engineers?

Flash forward a decade. Today, Dayen is editor-in-chief of The American Prospect, one of the best sources of news about private equity looting in the world. Writing for the Prospect, Luke Goldstein picks up Dayen's story, ten years on:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-05-22-raiding-red-lobster/

It's not pretty. Ten years of being bled out on rents and flipped from one hedge fund to another has killed Red Lobster. It just shuttered 50 restaurants and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Ten years hasn't changed much; the same kind of snark that was deployed at the news of Olive Garden's imminent demise is now being hurled at Red Lobster.

Instead of dunking on free bread-sticks, Red Lobster's grave-dancers are jeering at "Endless Shrimp," a promotional deal that works exactly how it sounds like it would work. Endless Shrimp cost the chain $11m.

Which raises a question: why did Red Lobster make this money-losing offer? Are they just good-hearted slobs? Can't they do math?

Or, you know, was it another hedge-fund, bust-out scam?

Here's a hint. The supplier who provided Red Lobster with all that shrimp is Thai Union. Thai Union also owns Red Lobster. They bought the chain from Golden Gate Capital, last seen in 2014, holding a flash-sale on all of Red Lobster's buildings, pocketing billions, and cutting Red Lobster's earnings in half.

Red Lobster rose to success – 700 restaurants nationwide at its peak – by combining no-frills dining with powerful buying power, which it used to force discounts from seafood suppliers. In response, the seafood industry consolidated through a wave of mergers, turning into a cozy cartel that could resist the buyer power of Red Lobster and other major customers.

This was facilitated by conservation efforts that limited the total volume of biomass that fishers were allowed to extract, and allocated quotas to existing companies and individual fishermen. The costs of complying with this "catch management" system were high, punishingly so for small independents, bearably so for large conglomerates.

Competition from overseas fisheries drove consolidation further, as countries in the global south were blocked from implementing their own conservation efforts. US fisheries merged further, seeking economies of scale that would let them compete, largely by shafting fishermen and other suppliers. Today's Alaskan crab fishery is dominated by a four-company cartel; in the Pacific Northwest, most fish goes through a single intermediary, Pacific Seafood.

These dominant actors entered into illegal collusive arrangements with one another to rig their markets and further immiserate their suppliers, who filed antitrust suits accusing the companies of operating a monopsony (a market with a powerful buyer, akin to a monopoly, which is a market with a powerful seller):

https://www.classaction.org/news/pacific-seafood-under-fire-for-allegedly-fixing-prices-paid-to-dungeness-crabbers-in-pacific-northwest

Golden Gate bought Red Lobster in the midst of these fish wars, promising to right its ship. As Goldstein points out, that's the same promise they made when they bought Payless shoes, just before they destroyed the company and flogged it off to Alden Capital, the hedge fund that bought and destroyed dozens of America's most beloved newspapers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Under Golden Gate's management, Red Lobster saw its staffing levels slashed, so diners endured longer wait times to be seated and served. Then, in 2020, they sold the company to Thai Union, the company's largest supplier (a transaction Goldstein likens to a Walmart buyout of Procter and Gamble).

Thai Union continued to bleed Red Lobster, imposing more cuts and loading it up with more debts financed by yet another private equity giant, Fortress Investment Group. That brings us to today, with Thai Union having moved a gigantic amount of its own product through a failing, debt-loaded subsidiary, even as it lobbies for deregulation of American fisheries, which would let it and its lobbying partners drain American waters of the last of its depleted fish stocks.

Dayen's 2020 must-read book Monopolized describes the way that monopolies proliferate, using the US health care industry as a case-study:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

After deregulation allowed the pharma sector to consolidate, it acquired pricing power of hospitals, who found themselves gouged to the edge of bankruptcy on drug prices. Hospitals then merged into regional monopolies, which allowed them to resist pharma pricing power – and gouge health insurance companies, who saw the price of routine care explode. So the insurance companies gobbled each other up, too, leaving most of us with two or fewer choices for health insurance – even as insurance prices skyrocketed, and our benefits shrank.

Today, Americans pay more for worse healthcare, which is delivered by health workers who get paid less and work under worse conditions. That's because, lacking a regulator to consolidate patients' interests, and strong unions to consolidate workers' interests, patients and workers are easy pickings for those consolidated links in the health supply-chain.

That's a pretty good model for understanding what's happened to Red Lobster: monopoly power and monopsony power begat more monopolies and monoposonies in the supply chain. Everything that hasn't consolidated is defenseless: diners, restaurant workers, fishermen, and the environment. We're all fucked.

Decent, no-frills family restaurant are good. Great, even. I'm not the world's greatest fan of chain restaurants, but I'm also comfortably middle-class and not struggling to afford to give my family a nice night out at a place with good food, friendly staff and reasonable prices. These places are easy pickings for looters because the people who patronize them have little power in our society – and because those of us with more power are easily tricked into sneering at these places' failures as a kind of comeuppance that's all that's due to tacky joints that serve the working class.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

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poetpony6890 · 28 days ago

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Drunken words, Sober thoughts

“Why would you allow him to drink that much?!” Alden exclaimed, watching as Ash shrugged his shoulders.

“Oh do not give me that shit. Who were you drinking with?” Alden asked, as Kit kept heaving into the bucket placed behind the sea creature covered panel, although it did not provide much privacy as everyone watched.

“Matais and Altair.” Ash replied, seeing no point in lying as neither of the two could kept their mouths shut.

“Where?” Alden asked, soothing the silk fabric of Kits traditional nixie drape, which had recently come into fashion with the arrival of a new king, they called them flows, as they hung off each limb of the body.

“In the woods.” Ash answered, moving towards the vanity that used to be Adaons to look at himself.

“Bullshit.” Alden declared, as Kit heaved once more into the wooden bucket.

“In the tent.” Ash muttered, Alden threw up his hands as Kit threw up his breakfast.

“Why would you go in there?! That was the one place Kieran told you not to go!” Alden scolded.

As Ash blandly ignored him and fixed his fabric in the mirror, the wooden door to the fae lantern lit room swung. In came both Denaruis, dressed in a flow as well, maroon and ebony and Kieran.

Since becoming King, the thing that has changed the most about the youngest son was his appearance, he had sunned the thought of how he had been dressed before, descended from years of cruelty, he had switched out the three piece ensemble that everyone had seen his father wear, and now regarded as a nixie head, an ivory and azure stained flow with a matching pair of opal earrings, and a stunning necklace.

His hair had even grown twice as long, now reaching the end of his shoulders, this time more wavy than ever.

“What is the matter?” He asked, coming around to the opposite side of the panel, bending down beside his nephew, ruffling Ashes silver blond hair well passing, who adjusted the ruby gem in the centre of his chest.

“Drinking is the matter.” Alden stated clearly, as Denaruis moved over to the large than normal round.

Not only had the fashion of the courts changed, but also the decor, Kierans first thought as King was to demolish the awful marble chairs that he had been informed no one had the guts to tell his father they did not like with a silver hanging chair, with handmade pillows, soft cushions and a table in the central.

“Who with?” Kieran asked, as Ash called Denaruis over with his hands to sit with him, bringing Adaons brush.

“Altair. In the tent.” Alden stated, as he got up and joined his honorary nephew and his brother.

“Are you fucking-?!” Kieran started.

“I love him so much and he hates me because I’m a dog murder!!” Kit suddenly came to.

“Ty?” Ash asked, who was now playing a game of cards with his uncles, which he always seemed to lose.

“It was just a dog.” Kieran stated, as the door to the room opened once more hastily as his mother came in.

“We replaced the dog.” Alden declared, slamming his cards down on the table and collecting his winnings.

She rushed over with a handfuls of fabric, bending next to the bucket and holding them out for Kieran to look over, as she did so she realized Kit was still heaving. She leaned down beside him and brushed his soft blond hair aside to avoid the vomit.

“It wasn’t just a dog. I yelled at him!” Kit cried as Thea slipped the sleeves of his vomit soaked flow off him.

“So, you yelled at him?” Alden questioned, shuffling the painted cards.

“He probably hates me!” Kit kept going, as Thea stood up and slid over to the wardrobe that had been a welcoming gift from the new kings many subjects, who upon seeing what he was capable of, wished to be.

“Why do you care so much about him? He is just a shadow hunter.” Denaruis asked, looking at his cards.

“Because I love him!” Kit sobbed, as Kieran stood but and moved over to his wooden wash table.

No one commented as Kieran pressed a cloth to his face to remove the mess, then Thea came behind him and slid an embroidered nightgown over his head, then down to his legs, helping him stand up on his feet.

“Do you love him or do you think to love you have to be in such pain?” Alden questioned, placing a card.

As Kieran helped him onto his bed, tucked him under the blankets, he wondered what the answer would be.

“No more drinking.” Kieran declared as he left the bed and joined his brothers on the floating seat.

After a few tosses and turns, the door opening and closing as Thea set out on her latest trend, Basil came in to gamble with a handful of coins, and finally General Winter came in to check on Kit, who he had watched try and keep up with Altair the alcoholic. He brassed his hand over Kits forehead, who glared at him.

“I helped him raise his sister from the dead.” Kit muttered, Winter leaned down to hear him.

“What do you mean you helped raise his sister from the dead?!” He shouted, Kieran and Alden whipped around.

“You raised his sister from the dead, what is wrong with you!!” Kieran shouted, swinging from his seat.

“I love him, Kieran.” Kit stated, as his uncle came and folded his knees in front of him.

“I know you do. What made you believe you had to do that?” Kieran wondered.

“Because he asked me to.” Kit whispered, looking deeply into Kierans saddened slate eyes.

From the seat, Ash swung off and came to join the two on the bed but not before removing his dirty boots.

“If he asked you do shoot yourself in the head would you do it?” Kieran asked, holding up the blanket for Ash

“If it saves him.” Kit muttered, Kieran shook his head disapprovingly, as Ash laid next to his brother.

As both Alden and Denaruis came over, Kit was certain he would shoot him self in the head for Ty. Tiberius.

“You must reflect for a moment on that thought, surely you would not go to such lengths for someone who would not even visit you well you here cooped up with those faceless freaks.” Denaruis shamed.

Yet on of those very same freaks had allowed him into his house, his life, his heart and he had packed up and left with the very same people he had been protecting him from long before he was born.

“He was going through a hard time.” Kit cleared, as Alden came to the left of him and soothed his head.

“When people go through a hard time they drink. When people change the foundations of their futures, they become someone else. Someone you may not know.” Winter declared, coming beside Kieran, who held Ashes hand as he fished with the rings on his fingers.

“I do know him.” Kit stated, relaxing into Alden’s hand as he messaged his scalp with his soft fingers.

“You have an unclear version of love I believe. People who love you would not ask for you to do such things.” Kieran stated, Kit thought back to the many times he had wished for love in that lonely house, waiting.

“I know what love is, I’m not stupid.” Kit shot, gazing his drunken eyes over the tapestry of animals over him.

“I did not say you were, Scoldia. What does love mean to you, in your heart? Have you ever felt it?” Kieran asked, as Winter watched Ash glare at Kit, Kit glare at the ceiling, Alden glare at Denaruis and Denaruis at him

“A lot more than you have.” Kit shot, Kieran, already a tad impatient, took a breath before losing it.

“You think so? Do you think love is being left for dead with a pack of wolves, do you think love is being locked in a house with no key? As a prince at a top of a tower you are. You have no context of love because you have never had it. Love is not leaving you alone for weeks because they could not deal with you. Being forced to take pictures in the bath, to be seen nude as a statue. Thrown against walls, punched in your jaw,burned with cigarettes where the eye does not meet, beaten with a belt until your back was raw at your refusal. Some people are not capable of love, Kit. If you had ever been given any you would know this.” Kieran finished, trying to raise his alarmed voice.

“We needed money.” Kit breathed as he turned into the feathered pillow beneath his head.

“You needed a father.” Kieran murmured, shaking his head.

“You need a father.” Kit drunkenly answered.

“I killed my father and for good reason.” Kieran stated, as Denaruis nodded in agreement.

“Well, I didn’t kill my dad. We aren’t the same.” Kit shoot.

“You didn’t have to. His vileness still seaps within you.” Kieran spat, standing from the bed back to the seat.

“I could say the same for you.” Kit argued, causing Ash to slap his shoulder slightly and Alden to back up.

“If you wish for me to say that I am an awful fae so be it. I am awful, I am vile, I am mean. I am aware of my actions, I have never claimed to deny them. I murdered my father, the father of my brothers. I would never go back and change what I have done. He was an absolute horrid man, an abusive father and an awful king. Every night I go to bed with the information that I have done it for the better.

Same goes for slitting Erecs neck open, I would do it every day over, because although they may not live forever, the memory of it will in my mind. I did not do it for just myself, I have done it for every one of the members of my tower, who have insured his rein. I have found them inner justice as I hope you can as well. Do not let your upbringing affect who you will become, because I know in my soul that you are much more than a monster, a dealer, a snake, an informant. If you never see yourself as more, you will never be more.”

“But that’s all I know, what if I’m not good at anything else?” What if that is all I’m ever going to be?”Kit asked, allowing his eyes to glaze over with the wine.

“You must stop thinking about who you were and start thinking of who you are.” Alden cleared.

“I don’t know who I am.” Kit hushed, looking towards his elder uncle as his eyes glazed over into sleep.

“You will find out as we all do, through error. I did not become General over a night. You must fail before you succeed. We will find a way to rid you of the ghosts of your pasts.” Winter cleared, as Kit remained silent.

“Why were you drinking to begin with?” Kieran asked, now turning to face Ash.

“He wished to, I simply came along. I did not drink.” Ash verbalized, as Kieran rolled his dark eyes.

“Why did he wish to drink?” Kieran questioned, forming a pleasant dream in his hands for his nephew.

“It ‘tis all he has ever known.” Ash muttered, leaning into Kits chest and falling asleep same as him.

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