I don't know about the Red Lobster thing. At first, it was a pretty clear clickbait headline. "It's endless shrimp that caused the end!" So clickbaity, I ignored them. But I guess they worked well enough (enough Gen Xers thinking--I remember that! let me click and go back to that simpler time when I wasn't worried about ever affording a house) that people kept talking about it. And now, actually, I'm only seeing "It's not endless shrimp!" stories. First there was this one: https://www.businessinsider.com/red-lobster-endless-shrimp-bankruptcy-private-equity-debt-real-estate-2024-5 . Which did make a big point about the selling of the property, but also said Thai Union Group really killed it. Then recently this one: https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/25/business/red-lobster-bankruptcy-thai-union/index.html . Which skipped past all that selling the equity and went straight into Thai Union Group mismanagement. After reading that, I dunno, it doesn't sound like status quo reporting, and it really does make Thai Union Group seem pretty at fault. (Also, even the crypto news sites couldn't get away from this story: https://protos.com/company-that-killed-red-lobster-put-shrimp-on-the-blockchain/ -- though the way they "chained" this to crypto is pretty tenuous.) As for the NYT article, it sounded insufferable so I didn't bother to see if it was paywalled (probably was).
As for the podcast, though--yeah, that's pretty f'in bad. That's some pure crock-o'-sh*tcoin. That's like hearing a story about someone's grandfather buying a Van Gogh for the equivalent of a dollar back in 1890. Then it gets stolen from the grandfather. But recently it gets recovered. Then it gets sold for $10 million by the ones who recovered it. Then $9,999,990 is paid to the 10,000 lawyers who filled out paperwork regarding the recovery and sale. Then the grandson is given $10 and told to be happy because he got his grandfather's money back with interest.
"On December 14, 2017, it was announced that Sulzberger would take over as publisher on January 1, 2018. He is the sixth member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family in the role. ... Sulzberger met with President Donald Trump at the White House on July 20, 2018. The meeting was off-the-record, but after President Trump tweeted about it eight days later, Sulzberger "pushed back hard" to dispute the President's characterization of the meeting. ... Sulzberger met with President Trump in the Oval Office a second time, on January 31, 2019, for an on-the-record interview along with Times reporters Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman. ... According to anonymous sources within the newspaper's staff, upon taking his position in 2018 Sulzburger "told employees explicitly that his biggest concern was that the paper’s audience saw it as a 'liberal rag...' [his] vision for the paper is to change that perception and court conservative readers." ... A POLITICO Magazine report detailed that Sulzberger has made a sit-down interview with President Joe Biden a priority for the newspaper, which claims to have interviewed every sitting president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Despite efforts to secure an interview, including appeals from Sulzberger directly to Vice President Kamala Harris, the White House has not allowed the Times the same level of access to the president as it did during the Trump Administration. An anonymous Times journalist told Politico in 2024, 'All these Biden people think that the problem is Peter Baker or whatever reporter they’re mad at that day...It’s A.G. [Sulzberger], he’s the one who is pissed [that] Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly encourages all the tough reporting on his age.' "
Interesting, I hadn't seen that CNN reporting on Thai Union. The operational stuff definitely seems hugely relevant, that'll kill you. It still seems notable that the piece wraps up with Endless Shrimp as his fatal mistake - I guess it's easier to quantify than "the restaurants got much worse" and the losses that might have caused? But if you add up all the info in there I'm still tempted to say rent was probably at least as significant as the operational and menu issues.
I don't know about the Red Lobster thing. At first, it was a pretty clear clickbait headline. "It's endless shrimp that caused the end!" So clickbaity, I ignored them. But I guess they worked well enough (enough Gen Xers thinking--I remember that! let me click and go back to that simpler time when I wasn't worried about ever affording a house) that people kept talking about it. And now, actually, I'm only seeing "It's not endless shrimp!" stories. First there was this one: https://www.businessinsider.com/red-lobster-endless-shrimp-bankruptcy-private-equity-debt-real-estate-2024-5 . Which did make a big point about the selling of the property, but also said Thai Union Group really killed it. Then recently this one: https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/25/business/red-lobster-bankruptcy-thai-union/index.html . Which skipped past all that selling the equity and went straight into Thai Union Group mismanagement. After reading that, I dunno, it doesn't sound like status quo reporting, and it really does make Thai Union Group seem pretty at fault. (Also, even the crypto news sites couldn't get away from this story: https://protos.com/company-that-killed-red-lobster-put-shrimp-on-the-blockchain/ -- though the way they "chained" this to crypto is pretty tenuous.) As for the NYT article, it sounded insufferable so I didn't bother to see if it was paywalled (probably was).
As for the podcast, though--yeah, that's pretty f'in bad. That's some pure crock-o'-sh*tcoin. That's like hearing a story about someone's grandfather buying a Van Gogh for the equivalent of a dollar back in 1890. Then it gets stolen from the grandfather. But recently it gets recovered. Then it gets sold for $10 million by the ones who recovered it. Then $9,999,990 is paid to the 10,000 lawyers who filled out paperwork regarding the recovery and sale. Then the grandson is given $10 and told to be happy because he got his grandfather's money back with interest.
Also, I hadn't heard anything specific about New York Times going conservative, so I looked up who owns it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._G._Sulzberger
"On December 14, 2017, it was announced that Sulzberger would take over as publisher on January 1, 2018. He is the sixth member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family in the role. ... Sulzberger met with President Donald Trump at the White House on July 20, 2018. The meeting was off-the-record, but after President Trump tweeted about it eight days later, Sulzberger "pushed back hard" to dispute the President's characterization of the meeting. ... Sulzberger met with President Trump in the Oval Office a second time, on January 31, 2019, for an on-the-record interview along with Times reporters Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman. ... According to anonymous sources within the newspaper's staff, upon taking his position in 2018 Sulzburger "told employees explicitly that his biggest concern was that the paper’s audience saw it as a 'liberal rag...' [his] vision for the paper is to change that perception and court conservative readers." ... A POLITICO Magazine report detailed that Sulzberger has made a sit-down interview with President Joe Biden a priority for the newspaper, which claims to have interviewed every sitting president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Despite efforts to secure an interview, including appeals from Sulzberger directly to Vice President Kamala Harris, the White House has not allowed the Times the same level of access to the president as it did during the Trump Administration. An anonymous Times journalist told Politico in 2024, 'All these Biden people think that the problem is Peter Baker or whatever reporter they’re mad at that day...It’s A.G. [Sulzberger], he’s the one who is pissed [that] Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly encourages all the tough reporting on his age.' "
His great grandfather is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Hays_Sulzberger . No relation to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Hayes_(banker) as far as I can see.
Interesting, I hadn't seen that CNN reporting on Thai Union. The operational stuff definitely seems hugely relevant, that'll kill you. It still seems notable that the piece wraps up with Endless Shrimp as his fatal mistake - I guess it's easier to quantify than "the restaurants got much worse" and the losses that might have caused? But if you add up all the info in there I'm still tempted to say rent was probably at least as significant as the operational and menu issues.