Lobster in the Red
When I was in college, a few friends and I used to fast for about 24 hours and then go to the Sizzler to see how much damage we could do to the all-you-can-eat buffet. As a Humanities major who’s spent decades writing on the internet, I’m pretty sure this was the last time I operated a successful business model. Age, GLP-1s, and gastrointestinal wear and tear have taken their toll, but I still like to think that, when push comes to shovel, I could put a pretty serious dent in a restaurant corporation’s market cap. So it’s probably lucky for Red Lobster that I’m not into shrimp. The waitstaff at Red Lobster can avoid me, but sadly, they can’t avoid all the other determined gluttons looking to take advantage of the struggling restaurant chain’s questionable decision to once again pimp the shrimp. Luke Winkie in Slate (Gift Article): Red Lobster’s Endless Shrimp Is Back. Employees Are Horrified. “Caught in the crossfire, of course, are the Red Lobster cooks and waitstaff, who have been asked to return to the infernal battlefields of Endless Shrimp. ‘We have this training app, and it told me I had a new notification. When I clicked on it, it was about Endless Shrimp,’ said a woman we’ll call Mary, who works at an East Coast Red Lobster location and is one of the rare employees who was hired during the brief interregnum after the company’s bankruptcy but before the reintroduction of the promotion. Mary says she was given a week’s notice to prepare for Endless Shrimp, an experience that might be compared to getting drafted to Vietnam in 1972. She wasn’t the only one bracing for impact. Scroll through the Red Lobster subreddit and you’ll find plenty of servers doomsaying about the approaching incursion of shrimp. (‘God no … I can’t … unless they let us kick people out after a certain time I just can’t,’ read the comment of one imperiled employee.) ‘All of my co-workers were like, ‘You have no idea what’s coming,’ Mary told me. ‘Before they brought it back, my co-workers were like, ‘It’s good you started working here after Endless Shrimp days were over.'” (That sounds like something I might say to young news curators after the Trump era…)
