Soggy Service: Technology-Based Corporate Greed is Killing the Restaurant Industry

I went to a late-night food spot in Central Florida the other night. The service was poor, it took me 20-plus minutes to get my food (when it was just three bao buns with toppings), and worst of all the portioning of ingredients in the baos themselves were very uneven. All this happened after it was revealed that my food had been packaged to go and was sitting there among an entire cluster of to-go bags. The entire experience left me with a sour taste because it wasn’t even busy indoors-----all their business was in the online ordering section as orders were popping up every minute or two.

So with that, there was zero focus on the customers (like myself) inside the building, there was less focus on actually making the baos properly and to its value, and after all was said and done it gave me zero reason to ever return. But I don’t blame anyone in this scenario except the owners because of the sheer dependence on receiving orders outside the restaurant space, while keeping the same level of staffing needed to just run the place indoors. And this situation is not just something that occurs here, its being experienced nationwide.

The extreme shift towards reliance on online/to-go orders in recent years which started -before- the pandemic era and has continued after we’ve survived the worst of it is the reason why entire restaurant chains are getting killed, why according to analysts potentially 40% of restaurants nationwide won’t survive the next few years, and why food and beverage was the hardest-hit sector in the American labor market scene.

This is a case in which the solution to the rising problem requires a willingness to actually scale back, and there’s no better example of this than Red Lobster.

(another restaurant where I had a terrible experience in the past year, it literally took an hour for us to get our cold food).

The current restaurant culture of online orders/doordash/ubereats, and developing multiple sources for you to receive your restaurant food is mostly responsible for why Red Lobster (among many many restaurants) continues its dismal downward spiral towards irrelevance and without a proper plan on how to recover. Technology has created this ugly monster that has affected the quality of restaurants nationwide, even if it was a necessity during the peak moments of the pandemic. Just recently, Red Lobster’s most recent CEO quit after a meager eight months, triggering fears that Red Lobster’s woes runs even deeper than what is being observed from the surface.

Red Lobster’s peak years were a result of reputation, quality, and becoming this highly-regarded destination for families and couples seeking a nice night out. There was heft and value attached to the Red Lobster branding, as it was synonymous with good food at higher-but-still-manageable prices. The endless shrimp campaigns, the infamous cheddar biscuits, the lobster tanks in the front revealing its reputation for fresh seafood, all these things were from a bygone era that saw spots like TGI Fridays and Applebees becoming mandatory go-to destinations for families and those seeking a fun outing. Red Lobster was a good time, a bit more upscale in behavior than the other sit-down chains, but a good time nonetheless.

Many many MANY factors contributed to Red Lobster’s downfall; the recipes didn’t evolve with the times, the quality of the ingredients got significantly worse (similar things happened to Pizza Hut post-1990s and McDonalds’ French fries odyssey from beef fat to soybean oil), the high risk/high reward concept of relying on seafood to create the menu that still needs to maintain more affordable costs when compared to fine dining places no longer paying off, terrible management, and a refusal to adapt to changing cultures and tastes within the United States. Even as Red Lobster went from being an international chain to merely domestic, its branding is still suffering, and nobody seems to figure out how to stop the economic bleeding.

To me however, the problem is quite simple: intrusive accessibility to food combined with greedy corner-cutting measures has created hostile work environments whose complications doesn’t justify the paychecks which remains below minimum wage and dependent on tips which have been getting steadily worse in recent years. Tips are down across the board because the quality of food has decreased as expectations increased (sometimes to ridiculous levels) and now there’s fewer actual bodies inside the building dining and drinking. Why dine at Applebees when I can dine at the comfort of my home for cheaper prices (because tipping stops being as much of a requirement when its online)? Why would greedy CEOs try to increase staffing when they can just profit by increasing the amount of responsibilities and methods of obtaining food?

The pandemic unveiled how close millions of working Americans are towards poverty and losing many basic amenities like housing, -especially- in the restaurant industry. During my final year at IHOP (I left months before the pandemic hit), I not only had to serve guests, but I also had to constantly keep an eye on the online orders, as we had -multiple- screens because -multiple- competing online apps were being utilized simultaneously, including IHOP’s very own app. So this means less time for my guests, which already is less than the norm, and more time having to spend making food so IHOP and other companies can make their money without me receiving a proper cut-----and all this while below minimum wage because of ancient-as-fuck laws which allows establishments to pay people that receive tips less than the minimum.

This is not only the nightmare scenario for restaurant workers like cooks and especially servers, but this also destroys the quality of the product coming from the establishment overall. Those baos that were relaxing and waiting for people to pick them up to deliver to customers at home? Nowhere near as good as they could be because food is constantly up against the clock---the longer it exists in its finished product the less appealing it becomes from visual to taste. And why did I leave my serving jobs entirely? Because the tips were decreasing rapidly, and once again, this is before the pandemic hit and before the horrifying trend of decreasing tips and worsening customer behavior.

So imagine being Red Lobster, a place that has to spend more because it’s a seafood-centric menu, constantly making and delivering food (as a reminder…seafood) that will be guaranteed 40-60% the quality of what it could have been had the customer arrived directly at the place. Zero chance the freshness of the seafood survives 10, 15, 20-minute drives to the destination while packaged in plastic containers. The quality just isn’t there anymore, and especially as companies have altered their recipes to make their meals as cheaply as possible. Even those cheddar biscuits don’t really hit quite as hard as they used to.

Fridays, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and even the local places that are strongly dependent on expanding its outreach with online ordering; all these places are sacrificing quality in order to dish out food at faster rates and ultimately nobody really wins (except the CEOs collecting bonuses, whether or not there’s even profits). There’s been a reckoning in the last two years with millions of people leaving food and beverage entirely, which has resulted in the job market being so pro-worker that the Trump AND the Biden administration instituted ridiculous decisions to try to tip the scales. So even as the jobs are supposedly back, hospitality overall is still struggling to getting back to full staffing.

Who can blame these people though? You want me to compete against online ordering, angry customers having to wait longer because of said online ordering, while making less than $8 an hour? Zero chance anyone would celebrate that scenario. None of these restaurants has to wait for politics to finally push the minimum wage to the $15-$20 with ZERO exceptions, they can make the move themselves if they want to earn back their workers. The week when I decided to quit Ale House, I was making a daily average of $25 in tips with customer lunchtime checks totaling $300-$500.

Until this ridiculous approach stops, the restaurants will keep struggling, the profits will drop, the workers will continue quitting, and ultimately the industry as a whole is going to undergo some severe pain years after the pandemic finally hits single-digit numbers of cases and disappears further into the newsmedia landscape. If you want to maintain quality and positive reviews from your customer base while having two to six options available to order food from, it requires full-staffing, smaller menus, better resources, and it bears repeating, an actual full staff that can handle the traffic.

Back to Red Lobster though, the first big decision that triggered eventual consequences was when they decided to sell those cheddar biscuit dough mixes in supermarkets nationwide. Their infamous exclusivity angle was shattered, as now arguably their most popular item is now available outside their restaurants. Why would you think this was a good idea? Can you imagine Chick-Fil-A offering their infamous chicken recipes in supermarkets? Red Lobster was an exclusive experience, but all those walls of self-created importance came crashing down as we can order their lobster dishes from home and receive said dishes at home, on top of making our own biscuits. The brand’s value dissipated because now their food can be found and consumed everywhere.

Almost all the restaurant chains whose brand values have dipped committed those same decisions, having their items lose their exclusivity and end up in store shelves and freezers. Combine this with the online ordering components and you’ve eliminated all the need to actually go the building itself. With this, the underpaid staffs suffer, and the companies in charge end up depending more on outside circumstances as opposed to the restaurants themselves to make the money.

Using Red Lobster as my guinea pig, if the seafood chain wants to win back its reputation, the exclusivity has to return, and then the quality needs to make a comeback once the pressure of online ordering dissipates.

If your local restaurant is struggling to survive because its competing in the mobile app ordering stratosphere, the solution is actually leaving it entirely. Red Lobster will never ever be a better option than say a Chick-Fil-A or a Dominos Pizza (another institution that perfected its online service components) in terms of online ordering so guess what, get rid of it altogether. If you want to enjoy Red Lobster, then come to Red Lobster directly and get the full experience again. Combine staffs from multiple Red Lobsters in the area so you can have a full-fledged staff that will cater exclusively to those who decide to visit and spend zero time interacting with angry Doordash drivers that always have the opportunity to steal some of the food before delivering it to the customer (which, yes, this scenario happened many times during my serving days in IHOP and Miller’s Ale House).

No more Red Lobster products in supermarket shelves, if you want those cheddar biscuits, you have to visit them. They can go a step -further- and offer an entire menu of cheddar biscuits with different variations (stuff some with cheddar, some with jalapeno cream cheese, hell maybe even stuff cheddar biscuits with shrimp scampi mix). Offer special seafood dishes exclusively in certain restaurants in certain regions of the country, whether it be grouper in Florida or Maine lobster in the New England restaurants. Start seeking the help of experienced and high-class mixologists and bartenders and upgrade the drink menus to offer specialty cocktails not found anywhere, maybe offer beers that are crafted and distributed within the headquarters themselves.

The -sameness- of the restaurant chains also hurts them severely, the familiarity advantage belongs to your fast-food and fast-casual restaurants and not to places where it will cost $20-$30 per guest especially if drinks and desserts gets involved. Offer the delicious meals in-house and never outside of it. If you absolutely have to stick with the online ordering shenanigans, then offer a condensed menu that will still keep you interested in returning to actually be served in the future.

But the most important suggestion I offer here to Red Lobster, to anyone that owns a restaurant or a dining chain reading this, is to stop torturing the workers by revving up their number of responsibilities and duties while keeping their pay small and expecting them to perform with the same energy and attention to detail towards the customers that does end up dining inside the building. Offer good pay AND offer the ability to accept tips, even the cooks should be tipped for making delicious meals. It does you no good to enhance your menus if you don’t also improve the working conditions of those who are supposed to carry out the changes.

Enough is enough, we have seen the value of the dollar slip significantly in the 21st century, and we’ve seen rising costs significantly hamper the average worker within the food and beverage and hospitality industry. It will require bold leadership to stop looking at the money line and take that giant step forward and offer significantly better pay to all its workers, and Red Lobster in the midst of all its bad press and declining reputation would be the perfect brand to craft this new generation of employer/employee relations within food and beverage.

What is happening now, cannot continue happening, and the wild shift in United States’ labor market has been significant evidence of this as we’re seeing generations of workers stepping away from the jobs they love simply because they can no longer accept its rising demands.

Online ordering benefits nobody except the people at the very top; the drivers, cooks, servers, and all other middlemen between the ordering of the food and the reception of the food have experienced zero benefit from the increased reliance on the technology. As a whole, we are all suffering more because of it. Food isn’t as good from these chains, the service has taken multiple steps back, and especially as the customer behavior has also sunk to new lows we’re seeing these companies accept this disconnect in favor of just handing out food to strangers to deliver to faceless customers who are paying through phones and the internet.

No relationships are being built. No casual or sit-down restaurant whose financial survival relies primarily on online offerings has won prestigious awards or has maintained a loyal fanbase. When you continue pushing internet food ordering, you are no longer an experience, you are just a service. Red Lobster is now just a name, it used to mean something, and its because you can find “Red Lobster” everywhere. This is why they can’t generate the money and hype like in the past, you’ve dissolved the name into just another entry inside the online ordering ecosystem, while also abusing the people who work for you with added responsibilities that comes with all the revenue streams.

Red Lobster can be saved, and your struggling restaurant can also be saved. But it starts with understanding the harm online ordering has done to the working class and to the industry’s quality overall. Pay your people better, stop relying on a system that diminishes the quality and value of your product, and seek ways to transform your place into an experience and not just a place whose menu can be browsed through online while looking for what can be delivered to your door. Online ordering isn’t inherently bad, it’s actually useful for your quick-service and fast-food spots with menus that doesn’t require as much effort and time. Nonetheless, it’s being abused by restaurants who have no business engaging with it (and utilized poorly), and as a result it has sent the restaurant industry into a tizzy that will eventually recover but not without many victims along the way.

Change your ways, or become the next casualty of the changing tides of the American post-pandemic era.