Comment by SoftTalker
2 years ago
And speaking of food quality, restaurants like Olive Garden and Red Lobster are just terrible. I'd rather get a fast-food fish sandwich, or fish and chips at the local brewpub, than eat anything at Red Lobster.
2 years ago
And speaking of food quality, restaurants like Olive Garden and Red Lobster are just terrible. I'd rather get a fast-food fish sandwich, or fish and chips at the local brewpub, than eat anything at Red Lobster.
And it's not a secret. Fettucine Alfredo? They open the plastic packet from Sysco, microwave for the appropriate amount of time, same with the sauce, put it on a plate... $18.
You're spot on. I haven't been to any sort of Red Lobster owned property in years. The last time I went to Olive garden it was completely transparent how the microwaved Sysco food is the norm now. I sat there thinking how AI could have just bought the same thing from the frozen aisle at half the price and not had to deal with sitting in a dirty Olive garden.
It’s not limited to these big chains at all — the vast, vast majority of restaurants in the States are at the mercy of Sysco. The restaurant industry is absolutely brutal right now. They are barely profitable and the best restaurants survive from underpaid family labor or under-the-table undocumented immigrants. Rent costs are insanely high, labor isn’t there and is bottom of the barrel, and non Sysco food costs too much. The average person still expects a $8 burger and fries when the cost to make it is $10 minimum.
The whole industry is on the verge of collapse, and we’ve had a ton of restaurant closures over in my neck of the woods since Covid. These aren’t Red Lobsters closing but beloved local places.
Anyone that has worked food in the last couple years knows how bad it really is.
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There are frozen bags of heat-in-a-pan Italian dishes in the grocery store that cost half what Olive Garden does (so, the slightly-fancy frozen meals—there are even cheaper ones) and also taste quite a bit better (though still not great).
They used to at least be better than high-side-of-mid-tier frozen grocery store meals. Not anymore. Their continued existence confuses me.
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So good old business of separating fools from their money.
The one thing Olive Garden has that Red Lobster lacks IMO is great service. Maybe I'm lucky, but I've never once had anything less than awesome service there. I don't go often, and yes it's not fine dining but it's a place to go to enjoy mediocre to good tasting food and be frustration free. I'll take that every single time over a place with better food but unreliable or frustrating service.
Red Lobster well... I've only been twice. Two different locations. The first time service was really, really slow. The second time it was non-existent. After about 15 mins of waiting, we grabbed another waitress who dismissively told us that our waitress just quit and hurried off like it was our problem to figure out. I don't remember the food at all, but even if it was stellar I'd not go back.
There's a local italian restaurant that I frequent which is 30% cheaper than Olive Garden and way, way tastier. There are dozens of other local restaurants that are also cheaper, and tastier, than Olive Garden.
I don't understand why these huge restaurant companies have such a hard time with the "make good food" part of their business model. It clearly can't be that hard if so many small businesses are able to do do it better.
The entire schtick of chain restaurants is consistency. For nationwide chains, that means that the same ingredients end up being used in relatively remote places without cheap access to fresh produce as in, say, California, where fresh produce is far more affordable.
The big chains also tend to aim for excessive variety on their menus, which again leads to food needing to be designed to be less perishable.
And then there's the chunk of profits that are going to run the national presence, ad spend, and line the pockets of shareholders.
All of this just doesn't seem like it flies with consumers in 2024.
I think people value quality over consistency when it comes to their leisure spending, especially when small restaurants can still be consistently good. Why do I care that the pancakes at an IHOP in Tampa taste the same as the IHOP in my neighborhood when the local diner across the street makes better pancakes than either of them?
Having lots of options doesn't mean a whole lot if all of them suck.
The national presence I think works to their detriment. Being able to buy ad spots during the superbowl makes a restaurant categorically un-cool. The number of times "I don't want to eat at a chain restaurant" comes up when discussing places to eat with my friends has practically turned the sentiment into a meme.
I imagine social media has played a huge role in this shift. People posting actual pictures of the food they got somewhere does a lot to undercut deceptive advertising and elevates meals that actually get people excited.
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> I don't understand why these huge restaurant companies have such a hard time with the "make good food" part of their business model. It clearly can't be that hard if so many small businesses are able to do do it better.
They would need to have people in the restaurant, tasting the food, observing the business, etc, and empowered to make decisions based upon the evidence. These companies are the opposite of that, and take away that power from the people actually conducting the operation. Even if they could get great cooks, waiters, hosts, managers, etc, to work at these restaurants, the value that they bring would be stifled.
I imagine the logistics of sourcing enough ingredients to supply a nationwide chain are much more complicated than a single local establishment, which pushes the nationwide chains towards more-consistent but lower-quality solutions like just buying from Sysco.
At that point you would think they would pivot to using their economies of scale to compete on price. But they're still more expensive than better local alternatives.
My best guess is that the price is inflated by the huge amount of money they spend on national ad campaigns, which I'm convinced at this point do not even work. Any restaurant big enough to buy ad spots during the superbowl is by definition "not cool" to the under-40 crowd. None of the most popular restaurants among my peer-group where I live even run local TV ads, and they don't need to.