Things That Amuse You

[Buster Highmen]

[jackstraw]

Flew into Boston today and within the first 10 minutes of driving heard 4 aggressive horn beeps (technically 8 because one hit it 4 times in a row) and hadn't heard one in the past 8 months. Welcome home![emoji16]

[Jax]

[Danno]

Doggie Stoke thread - created in 2006 - 441 pages

Wagon Stoke thread - created in 2015 - 295 pages

Kid Stoke thread - created in 2012 - 2 pages !!

There's a kid stoke thread in the main forum that everyone uses. And there's the fatherhood thread in here that people use as a kid stoke thread

[Mustonen]

The end of endless shrimp? Red Lobster files for bankruptcy protections. With all-you-can-eat shrimp Americans were bound to end the Crustacean Era.

Seems the nail in the coffin actually was an underestimation of Americans’ appetites for all-you-can-eat shrimp, leading to them posting deep 1Q losses.

Funny/sad

Discount Tire is ready for anything.

Not usually the sort of thing you’d post in a customer area.

[J. Barron DeJong]

Seems the nail in the coffin actually was an underestimation of Americans’ appetites for all-you-can-eat shrimp, leading to them posting deep 1Q losses.

Funny/sad

Pretty sure it was the private equity looting, not endless shrimp, that caused the bankruptcy.

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pl...s-ac092ac1de39

[highangle]

Seems the nail in the coffin actually was an underestimation of Americans’ appetites for all-you-can-eat shrimp, leading to them posting deep 1Q losses.

Funny/sad

That story is bullshit put out by the new ownership that mismanaged Red Lobster into the dirt.

They're just trying to make themselves look like they were in fact capable of managing a large American restaurant chain, and it was the customer who let them down.

[old goat]

Pretty sure it was the private equity looting, not endless shrimp, that caused the bankruptcy.

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pl...s-ac092ac1de39

Endless shrimp. Endless greed. Same thing, only difference is social class.

[MultiVerse]

Pretty sure it was the private equity looting, not endless shrimp, that caused the bankruptcy.

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pl...s-ac092ac1de39

According to Jong's source Red Lobster became a seafood cartel that was subsequently hit hard by fishery management policies to limit over-fishing. Cory Doctorow calls it the "fish wars." Even though Doctorow doesn't say it outright, he implies cartel collusion led to seafood supply issues, not over-fishing in general.

So on the one hand Red Lobster's fall was caused by private equity and mismanagement. But the underlying issue was supply problems, according to the bankruptcy documents, resulting in major shortages of shrimp with restaurants often going days or weeks without shrimp.

What Doctorow gets wrong is the scam wasn't so much class warfare as it was internecine warfare between the corporate management team and its creditors. On the corporate side the owner, Thai Union, used the endless shrimp promotion to extract as much as possible from its by then failing investment at the expense of Red Lobster’s creditors.

Working class patrons benefited from all of this because for a limited time their lifestyle was subsidized by Thai Union giving away shrimp without regard for long term supply obligations. The reality is there's no longer enough supply to sustain peak 700 nationwide Red Lobster restaurants.

[Mustonen]

Endless shrimp leading to huge losses == hilariously incompetent mismanagement. I don’t see the conflict.

PE looting can be all the other coffin nails. I’ll grant I screwed up the “final nail” idiom. But that’s pretty well implied I think.

Whatever. Drowning in endless shrimp is still amusing.

[MultiVerse]

Yeah, agreed, it's funny and directionally accurate. Matt Levine has a good take on the episode:

CEO: We’re in a lot of trouble, any ideas?

Chief Financial Officer: Let’s close some underperforming locations and do a liability management exercise.

CEO: I have a better idea. Shrimp.

Chief Experience Officer: What about shrimp in particular?

CEO: I think we should buy a ton of shrimp and then sell the heck out of them. I’m talking heavy in-store promotion, a permanent unlimited shrimp for $20 deal, maybe commission some songs about shrimp.

Chief Experience Officer: We actually have pretty detailed demand projections and they show that customers only want —

CEO: Never mind the projections, I am telling you, the answer is shrimp. We use every penny we have left to buy shrimp, and the demand will follow!

Chief Experience Officer: ...

CEO: Just bet the whole company on shrimp.

Chief Supply Chain Officer: Okay I guess we can bid out a huge new shrimp contract to suppliers.

CEO: Oh no, no bids.

Then he gets up from the table and shrimp fall out of his pockets and he walks out of the boardroom trailing shrimp everywhere, this is what corporate finance is all about.

[bennymac]

Things that amuse you: 6,000 posts

Things that annoy you: 46,000 posts

This amuses me

[Flounder]

Replaced a couple of cedar posts we use to corral the blackberry’s. Found the string line that’s been missing for about a decade. It was 2 1/2 feet down in the hole.

[evdog]

Ha.

I went to a trail day last year and one of the riders who showed up brought a machete along. Not sure why, since we were primarily doing tread work. And machetes are one of the most useless (and dangerous) tools for brushing in Socal. The guy set it down on a section of the trail where we were re-building the trail bench and it got buried. He dug around a bit but never found it. If the crew didn't do a good job of controlling water flow from the trail it'll eventually turn up.

[m2711c]

if you can sew a corn, you can sew a person...








fact.

[Supermoon]

Ohio billionaire plans to take $20M sub to Titanic site to prove industry’s safer after OceanGate implosion

https://trib.al/85w5CQ6

[Dantheman]

Terrence Howard

[evdog]

No pic... but saw a pickup truck today with the bed full of trophies. Probably 25-30 of them. And not small ones. A lot of them stood a foot or more taller than the cab of the truck like the ones below.

Made me wonder if the guy was moving houses or if he just drives around with them all the time, look at me!!!.

[gravitylover]

When you wake up in the morning and don't feel like working so you roll over and go back to sleep.

[J. Barron DeJong]

https://x.com/cbsnews/status/1795874...sR_NcRK2VkCfkg

“…and I am just pulling up right now.”

Gold.

[highangle]

Confirmed TGRaholic outs self irl...

[KQ]

Playground safety test

[east or bust]

People in Minnesota holding their tick infested cabins on a pedestal.

[MultiVerse]

The fact that a dog can get a Lyme disease vaccine, but a human can’t

[gravitylover]

Not amusing. Belongs in the annoying thread.