Ask suzzer about Red Lobster/chain restaurants

Ok this may be interesting, maybe not. But I have the day off so wth. I've waited a lot of tables in the mid-range family sector:

Red Lobster- 5 years off and on, KC and SF: Waited on the dregs of humanity from every race/cuture imaginable. Boss was a psychopath at one place. Famous customers: Tammy Fae Bakker. I want to say some wrestler, but I can't remember.

Macaroni Grill - 1.5 years: Worked with an assload of hot girls who liked to get DRUNK. We were near the local dinner theater so I waited on/saw: Don Knotts, Larry Linville (Frank Burns), Marion Ross (Mrs. C), Topol, a bunch of KC Chiefs.

McCormick & Kuleto's (same as McCormick and Schmick's) - 1.5 years: They put Pat Kuleto's name on the place in an effort to get the sophisticated SF local crowd to come. I think they checked it out at first, but by the time I worked there it was 95% tourists. Waited on every kind of foreigner imaginable. Famous customers: Lisa Bonet and Zoey (looked completely strung out), Journey, Barry Levinson.

Frenchman's Reef in the Virgin Islands - 6 months: Nice resort in it's day, sort of fading by the time I worked there. Outdoor restaurant was so hot I would come to the table as a giant ball of sweat. I think it helped me get sympathy tips. Famous customers: Ice Cube, Ron Brown right before he died.

Chubby's - 3 months: KC diner run by the mob, got my waiter experience. My fellow waitstaff were almost exclusively female ex-cons, many of them still living in halfway houses. Waited on an autistic guy who would order 20 strips of rare bacon every day. Also crack babies and old people with IV's hanging out their arms and ****. Famous Customers: none I can remember.

All you guys who are into these corporate chain places, I think if you really saw how they were run you'd be pretty turned off by them. Just think next time you sit down - that entire teams of MBAs have been sitting around trying to figure out how to (1) get you to pay more and more for ever crappier food, (2) get you the hell out of the restaurant as fast as possible, and (3) get your local regional supervisor to browbeat the general manager into incentivizing his mangers to cajole the waitstaff into "upselling" you on a bunch of extra crap you don't want.

I watched Macaroni Grill change pasta suppliers twice in the time I worked there, each time to a slightly cheaper and inferior product. And I'm pretty sure they did that with just about every other ingredient. In the year and a half I worked there I would say they went from pretty good food when I started to very mediocre by the time I left.

Red Lobster on the other hand seemed to have stabilized at a base level of general crappiness long before I came on board.

The problem with the newer corporate places like Macaroni Grill and McCormick and Schmick's is they have to continue sell a growth story to their investors - since their stock price is reflects the projected value based on past growth. If that curve starts to look flat, all of a sudden the projected value of the company plummets, the stock tanks, and a bunch of executives don't make their multi-million $$ bonii. So if they can't keep growing by opening new stores, they start trying to squeeze more profits out of the existing stores. And that can get ugly for the people who work there and the customers.

Any enough of my yambaggery. Fire away if you have any questions.