Red Lobster eyes bankruptcy option after $11M in losses from endless shrimp promotion —ABC News

When we said endless, boy, did we mean it. Boy did we commit. A perpetual parade of scrunched somites, broth-drenched and sweet. And oh, how we promoted them! Trotted out their little bodies in a sea of buttered light.

Endlessness, after all, is what the people want—or, what the folks who corral the markets (and therefore, the people) have convinced us we all want. Wanting, after all, being the only language most people understand.

Shrimp, on the other hand, speak Yearning; so different from Wanting. Shrimp—our analysts have explained—speak Effervescence; Mabinogi; Hesitancy. They speak Loneliness, dammit! Singing their silly shrimp songs, shrinking under sinking sand, flicking ticklish flagella. As a general policy, we at Red Lobster discourage Loneliness. We’ve rebranded it “aspirational individualism” and, as part of our roll-out, we commit to the total abolition of Loneliness through the complete annihilation of shrimp.

The shrimp—well, they just twitch their pliant pleopods. They can’t help that all the people want them. Endlessly. And we leveraged that! Steamed them right up in cheap stock and bay leaves and blinkered their glitchy chittering to drive year-over-year increases in gross revenue—oh, until we floundered, until the endlessness kept endlessly on and on…

Now, our crumbling real estate tumbles around the ears of the insatiable. Our money has dissolved into a meaningless morass of green litigating the light. But wait—we see you licking your lips now, you can almost feel their plumped-up sheen. Go on. Pull up the menu screen. Let’s all take one more bite. Watch that golden butter drip, drip, drip from their legless, faceless lumps. So many, they’ve put us under. So many, you can’t remember Loneliness.