Red Lobster officially filed for bankruptcy Monday, after a grim week that saw nearly 100 stores shut down around the country. The restaurant chain has cycled through multiple owners and leadership cabals over the past 10 years, and each of them attempted to stabilize the chain, to no avail. One of these rescue plans was the restaurant’s now-infamous Endless Shrimp promotion—in which, for $20, customers could order an unlimited supply of fried shrimp, shrimp scampi, or “street corn shrimp” to their table. The plan, as far as I can tell, was for guests to fill up on just enough shellfish to preserve Red Lobster’s profit margin. It backfired spectacularly: The restaurant’s clientele scarfed down enough shrimp to accumulate an $11 million operating loss in the fourth quarter of 2023.
Of course, the actual reasons Red Lobster is circling the drain are more complicated than a runaway shrimp promotion. Business Insider’s Emily Stewart explained the long pattern of bad financial decisions that spelled doom for the restaurant—the worst of all being the divestment of Red Lobster’s property holdings in order to rent them back on punitive leases, adding massive overhead. (As Ray Kroc knows, you’re in the real estate business!) But after talking to many Red Lobster employees over the past month—some of whom were laid off without any notice last week—what I can say with confidence is that the Endless Shrimp deal was hell on earth for the servers, cooks, and bussers who’ve been keeping Red Lobster afloat. They told me the deal was a fitting capstone to an iconic if deeply mediocre chain that’s been drifting out to sea for some time.
“I had a guy come in with his family. It was a family of five. And he did 16 rounds of shrimp scampi,” said James Berke, a 23-year-old in New Jersey, who until very recently worked at a Red Lobster. “He was there for over two hours on a busy Friday night. They had one of my biggest tables. I just had to watch this man eat plates upon plates of the scampi, which isn’t even served over pasta. It’s shrimp in a garlic-wine butter. It was so gross.”
Berke quickly noticed two major problems with the Endless Shrimp promotion. First, and most important, a $20 charge for dinner is fairly low compared with the rest of Red Lobster’s menu. According to Berke, the average entree price at the restaurant is around $35, which means that once the all-you-can-eat format became a permanent fixture in the company’s dining rooms last summer, he was suddenly making far less on tips. “I usually made $200 a night before Endless,” said Steve, another Red Lobster employee, who asked to remain anonymous. “Once it became a thing, I was down to $90.”
There was also the fact that when parties arrived at Red Lobster looking to pig out on a bargeful of shrimp, they simply wouldn’t leave. Berke’s experience serving a man who put away 16 servings over the course of two hours was actually mild compared with some of the other stories I’ve heard. Josie, 19, who also asked to be anonymous, worked at a (now-shuttered) Kansas City Red Lobster, where she watched a solo diner take down 30 orders of fried shrimp within four hours. According to the nutritional information on Red Lobster’s website, that’s something like 14,000 calories.
“He was a skinny guy too,” Josie said. “I was like, Where is it all going?”
But the top thing employees will not miss about Red Lobster are the arguments and confrontations they’d frequently endure when informing customers about the rules that come buoyed to the Endless Shrimp deal. For instance, guests cannot request a box to take their Endless Shrimp home, nor can they share their servings with the rest of the table. (In other words, only one phantasmagoric shrimp binge per person.)
“You had groups coming in expecting to feed their whole family with one order of endless shrimp,” Josie said. “I would get screamed at.” She already had her share of Cheddar Bay Biscuit battle stories, but the shrimp was something else: “It tops any customer service experience I’ve had. Some people are just a different type of stupid, and they all wander into Red Lobster.”
Steve told me he’s “never been more disrespected in my life” than by the Endless Shrimp patrons. (“My manager got spat in the face,” he added.) Steve also noticed a subtle shift in the makeup of Red Lobster’s dining room, as the older folks who “dressed up and looked nice” for a meal at the restaurant were edged out by a younger, rowdier crowd.
But none of this is Josie’s or Berke’s problem anymore. Both of them worked Mother’s Day—one of the biggest days on the sit-down restaurant calendar—and woke the next morning to learn that their Red Lobsters had been padlocked for good. (“They made us work Mother’s Day to get that quick buck, and then they closed us,” Berke said.) Some 500 locations will remain open for now during the bankruptcy process, but their future is uncertain.
That is bad news for Michael Durrant, a 23-year-old who told me he is “very broke” and recently relied on a night with Red Lobster’s Endless Shrimp to sustain him while his account balance looked bleak. Durrant agreed to speak to me to satisfy my curiosity about the other side of this equation: the people who ate all that damn shrimp.
Durrant said he once spent between three and four hours in the dining room, downing 83 shrimp in total, and took “at least one nap” at the table.
“I am bummed that Red Lobster is going away,” Durrant said. “But I get it. There’s not really anything on the menu worth getting other than the Endless Shrimp.”
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