Seafood restaurant chain Red Lobster has closed one hundred locations around the United States, according to its website.
One hundred Red Lobster locations in Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, California, and Florida, were listed as closed on the company website as of Tuesday.
CEO and Founder of TAGeX Brands, Neal Sherman, announced in a post on LinkedIn on Monday that his company would be hosting “the largest restaurant liquidation” through an online auction. The TAGex website listed auctions for 48 Red Lobster locations throughout the U.S. that had been closed and would be auctioning off kitchen items and furniture from the locations.
Red Lobster locations in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Watertown, New York, Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Bloomingdale and Danville, Illinois, were among the restaurants that were closed.
All three locations in Jacksonville, Florida, were also listed as being closed, according to the restaurant chain’s website.
One employee from the Red Lobster in Buffalo, New York, told WKBW that he found out about the restaurant closure from one of the cooks, and not from corporate.
“I’m getting calls after calls this morning and my boy Don called me and he’s like, ‘You should come in right now,'” Ramon Garcia told the outlet. “I’m like, ‘Why, I’m off today,’ and he’s like, ‘Man, you just need to come in because there’s a lot of stuff going on.'”
The first Red Lobster location was opened in Lakeland, Florida, in 1968, and today the seafood chain has more than 700 locations throughout the world.
This comes nearly a month after Red Lobster considered filing for bankruptcy after their all-you-can-eat shrimp promotion led to the company losing $11 million during 2023.
“For those who have been in the US recently, $20 was very cheap,” Red Lobster CFO Ludovic Garnier said in a statement in November. “And the rationale for this promotion was to say we knew the price was cheap, but the idea was to bring more traffic in the restaurants.”
ThaiUnion, a Thailand-based company that specializes in producing seafood-based products, bought a stake in Red Lobster in 2020. Years later, in January 2024, ThaiUnion released a statement that it would be exiting from Red Lobster and taking a $530 million loss from its investment in the company.
