#darden.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

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

[lowkeyrobin]

hii! :D what about a tmr fic with frypan? like a nice fluffy platonic one where reader and him are just besties. could be like a headcanon or a fic idk my boy frypan does not get enough love anything would be fine

oh my god yes of course!! ; and you're so right he does NOT get enough love within this fandom & I rlly wish we saw more of him in death cure :( that was his best era and I'll stand by that ; but yes of course, thanks for requesting, hope you enjoy!!!

FRYPAN ; besties core

summary ; what it's like being best friends w fry

warnings ; language, most of this being death cure stuff cause idk

word count ; 417

masterlist

yall r tied to the HIP

you're literally that duo

forget newt and thomas or brenda and jorge, you and fry are the moment

you're literally the only person to call him siggy (his actual wckd name) and that's a rare occurrence

you have a handshake too

it's corny but it's cute

he shows you food recipes a lot

he also taught you how to drive cause he was a natural at it

you guys cackled for a second because of irony + adrenaline after he flipped it on the way to the last city

newt was stumbling everywhere and thomas was worried you all died for a sec 💀 and you're both hysterical before you begin to dig around the turned over vehicle looking for the rifle that fry brought

you two are left in the background while the others do their main character shit

like playing checkers, tic tac toe, and rock paper scissors while waiting for brenda to steal the bus and rescue the other kids wckd had in their possession

you were on the bridge while fry was working the control panel

you were the one kind of directing him for 100% accuracy + the first to get down to brenda and the kids to lead them back to lawrence's lair

meanwhile you were joking with each other the whole way there about how he didn't work fast enough and how he hit so many buildings with the bus and how you were shit at communicating

in the safe haven, you spend most of your time together

you fish, he cooks

and a lot of the time you help him cook

you get drunk off of gallys secret recipe from the Glade for the first time in a long time and run around on the beach together

gally joins you for a bit just to look over you so you didn't end up drowning

fry would be fine, but you? eh... maybe

lots of wrestling on the beach and drawing in the sand together

and regaining memories together 💔

you guys always share what you remember right when it happens, whether it be in your sleep or if you zoned out or were hallucinating it

"dude, my real name is pre-wicked/name!"

"honestly, y/n fits you better"

"im not gonna be saying that when you remember yours, siggy"

"man..."

lots of coping in general together, and making new phrases to create like modern genz slang

"that fit ate up, brenda!"

"thank you!"

"bro had that crank rizz 💀"

"y/n, someone just died"

[onlydylanobrien]

Dylan O’Brien, Dexter Darden and Aml Ameen had a mini "Maze Runner" reunion at the "American Fiction" premiere at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, California. (December 5, 2023)

📷©: AmlAmeen on Twitter / X

[skephknap]

DEXTER IS GETTING MARRIED🥹🥹

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

[lilsphoto]

~ "The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials" ~

[tags-ohara]

CHICAGO FIRE 12.06 PORT IN THE STORM

[garadinervi]

Damon Locks, List of Demands, (Limited Edition Color Vinyl LP, Classic Black Vinyl LP, Digital album), IARC0092, International Anthem, 2024

All Songs/Lyrics by Damon Locks except High Priestess lyrics by Krista Franklin

Players Damon Locks: voice and electronics Krista Franklin: voice on High Priestess Ralph Darden: drums on Isn't It Beautiful and turntables on Meteors Of Fear Ben Lamar Gay: cornet on Holding The Dawn In Place and melodica on Click Macie Stewart: violin on Distance and Isn't It Beautiful

Recorded by Alex Inglizian at Experimental Sound Studio and Dave Vettraino at International Anthem Studios Mixed by Dave Vettraino at International Anthem Studios Mastered by David Allen

Cover Art: Damon Locks

[forever70s]

Christine Darden, mathematician and NASA aeronautical engineer (1975)

[echos-muses]

i will literally never be over how peter mills is the one who went to hold matt after he got the news that hallie died. not even gabby could do it, but peter did it without hesitation. even though he felt some type of way towards casey, he went to comfort him when someone he loved and almost married died. everyone else was so shocked and didn’t know what to do, but peter? peter mills’s gut instinct was to put his personal feelings aside and comfort someone who he thought was making his life at work hell on purpose because he was with gabby. peter mills who instantly took in a puppy because it would’ve been drowned otherwise. peter mills who always tried to get people to smile. peter mills who lovingly cooked for everyone. i will never ever ever not love peter mills so much. he was such a great addition to the show. he was empathetic, kind, hard-working, ambitious, caring, determined. i love chicago fire so fucking bad, this show has genuinely made me sob so many times, so many ways, for so many different reasons.

[scisac]

newt + frypan - the death cure 2018

[alovesogentle]

I forgot to tell yall about this other hit

Night Cruisin' Summer '24

[stellarfire]

not to be emotional on main (read: side blog) (note: it will happen again) but there’s something so poignant and wonderful about stella and kelly - both of whom had rough upbringings, fought hard to protect others over themselves, and were taken in by other people one way or another at some point, amongst various other points - adopting a child and saving them from similar things to what they had to endure, getting to provide them the love and care they deserve :((((

i will never ever shut up about that thank you for coming to my tedtalk

[bellzsad]

if we don’t get a ten year anniversary cast reunion for the maze runner this year… i’m rioting

[sevcasejay1chicago]

Welcome home- Matt Casey x Darden!Sister

Authors note: Sorry that it’s been so long since I posted!!! It’s been a crazy few weeks and I honestly just haven’t had the motivation. This is a continuation to a story I wrote a while ago containing these two love birds.

Summary: Kelly and Stella finally bring you back home.

Warnings: NONE; possible spoilers maybe.

———————

You and Matt Casey kept your relationship going even through your move to Portland to be with your nephews, the Darden boys. When Matt had the weekend off, he would often fly over to Portland and help you out with whatever you needed. Sometimes, all you needed was him.

About three years later, Stella called you and told you about her engagement to Kelly. You were thrilled. You always knew that they would get married. You never knew Kelly to love someone and to be so devoted to them like he was to Stella Kidd. That woman had Kelly Severide wrapped around her finger.

When you got a call from Matt later on in the night, you were surprised to find that this FaceTime was filled with many familiar faces.

“Hey Darden!” Kelly yelled over Matt’s shoulder.

Clamoring could be heard as Jay Halstead, Mouch, Hermann, Sylvie, and a few others from intelligence and 51 tried to get in the frame to say hi. You giggled as you watched Kelly take Jay in a headlock and demand your attention. Everyone was clearly VERY drunk.

Matt chuckled as he watched the scene unfold on his end, but most of his attention was on you and your giggling self. He has never heard a sound more beautiful than your laugh or seen anything brighter than your smile.

Once Matt was able to break away, he stepped outside and sat at a picnic table far from the outdoor bar. He stared at you for a moment as you wrote something down, biting your lower lip in concentration. All he wanted in that moment was to rub the knots, that he knew were on your shoulders from stress, away and catch your bottom lip in his.

You noticed him staring after a minute or two and immediately blushed, hiding behind the sleeves of the hoodie Matt left you the last time he came out to Portland. “What?” You giggled, pushing your reading glasses up while you hid behind your hands.

Matt shook his head and chuckled. “Nothing. Nothing. You are just too damn adorable.” Matt smiled shyly at being caught, but he was also doing his best to hide what you were doing to him just by being you. “God. I miss you.” Matt breathed, leaning against the picnic table and setting his phone against the napkin dispenser to rub his hands together in an effort to warm them back up.

You smiled sweetly back at him. “I miss you too honey.” You whispered, flopping back into your pillows. “Sooooo, did Kelly ask you to be his best man?” You asked, wiggling your eyebrows.

Matt chuckled, missing your antics. “Of course he did! Who else would be able to deal with Groomzilla?!” Matt joked, causing you to burst out laughing.

“True. True.” You said, struggling to catch your breath. “Stella asked me to be a bridesmaid, but I don’t know what things will look like around the time of the wedding, so I had to decline.” You explained, pouting slightly.

Matt hummed. “Well, I’m sure it’ll all work out. We have time.”

You nodded in thought before flipping onto your side and settling in for the night. You placed your phone on its upright charging port as you stared at Matt. “If you can, leave me on. It’ll be like I’m part of the fun.” You whispered, hiding a yawn behind your sleeve.

Matt knew you wouldn’t last much longer, so he easily agreed, standing up and carrying his phone around as he re-entered the crowded bar filled with your family.

———————

The day was here. Stella and Kelly were finally getting married. As far as Matt knew, you had to stay in Portland because Ben got himself into some trouble. Matt was kinda thankful for you not being here in this moment as everything seemed to be falling apart and he just knew you would be frantically trying to fix everything if you were here.

“Hey guys! A party boat just opened up and we can have the wedding there!” Cruz yelled from halfway down the block.

The wedding party all went running, eager to get there and get everything arranged. Once they arrived, Matt was pleasantly surprised and confused with how nicely the boat was decorated in line with Kelly and Stella’s wedding theme. That was, until you popped up behind him.

“Hey handsome.” You whispered, wrapping your arms loosely around his waist.

He knew those hands and that voice anywhere. He immediately turned in your arms and lifted you into his own, twirling you around. “Oh my God!” Matt yelled, chuckling as he spun you around. Once he sat you down, he swooped in to kiss you deeply. He only pulled back when he was desperately in need of air. “Wha- how?!” Matt asked, still trying to understand how you were here.

“Welllll.” You drawled out, leaning back slightly to get a better look at him. “I was really busy moving my stuff back into your apartment while you were at Kelly’s last night. Stella held her bachelorette party there while we unpacked my stuff.” You smiled, proud to have pulled one over on him.

Matt gawked at you, absolutely speechless.

“Then, when I went to start decorating this morning, I realized that the church was double booked and had this set up. Everyone helped get you here. We figured you deserved some good news after the tough year you’ve had.” You explained, smiling as everyone around you agreed.

“Plus, this is like the best wedding gift EVER. THE BAND IS BACK TOGETHER!” Stella yelled, pumping her fist in the air.

Everyone chuckled and immediately agreed.

Matt wrapped his arms tighter around your waist, burying his face in your hair. After a few moments, Matt pulled back and kissed you on the forehead before shouting, “LETS GET KIDD AND SEVERIDE HITCHED!”

As everyone began to walk to their seats or to their places, Matt pulled you into his side and gave you one more kiss. “Welcome home baby.”

———————

At the reception, Matt has you sitting in his lap with his arms wrapped around you. “So, where are Griffin and Ben?” Matt asked, kissing the side of your head.

“So, here’s the thing.” You began, turning in his lap to look Matt in the eyes. “Griffin got accepted into Northwestern and Ben was okay with moving home with you, so I brought Ben with me and Griffin is staying on campus.” You explained, toying with your necklace as you spoke.

“Wait, so Ben is here?!” Matt asked, immediately ecstatic.

You chuckled, calming down now that the biggest secret was out. “Yeah. Griffin is at the apartment with him now. He will be staying for the night before going back to his dorm so that we can have the night out. He expects Uncle Matt’s famous eggs in a basket tomorrow morning.” You chuckle, shaking your head at the fact that Griffin remembered his favorite meal that Matt made him as a kid.

Matt beamed, kissing you on the temple. “He can have anything he wants.” Matt assured, smiling proudly at the fact that Griffin remembered things from their time together. For the first time since you left, Matt was finally content.

[mustprotectmattcaseyatallcosts]

Andy: Hey, Matt? Can I get some dating advice?

Matt: Just because I’m with Kelly doesn’t mean I know how I did it