In 2003, Red Lobster learned a hard lesson: When you offer "Endless Crab" for dinner, you'd better be ready to serve endless crab. In a story on the ups and downs of the seafood chain, BuzzFeed documents one of Red Lobster's biggest mistakes: a 2003 "Endless Crab" special that was taken too literally by diners.
Red Lobster's tactical error was underestimating just how many times customers would request another crab plate during a single visit. "It wasn't the second helping [of crab], it was the third that hurt,” said Joe Lee, CEO of parent company Darden Restaurants, on a call with investors. "And the fourth," said Red Lobster president Dick Rivera.
Eventually, then-president Edna Morris stepped down, Red Lobster discontinued the offer, and now-CEO Kim Lopdrup managed to pull the company out of its financial tailspin. And hungry Red Lobster customers can still eat way, way too much crab — they'll just need to buy a bunch of platters. Scott Meslow
Foreign spectators will get money back on their canceled Tokyo Olympics tickets, but whether they'll be reimbursed for the full price they paid remains to be seen, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The Tokyo organizers remain in a standoff with authorized third-party ticket resellers over who should bear the costs of service fees — extra charges on ticket purchases to account for things like currency conversion and credit card fees — paid by foreign spectators who are now barred from attending the Games because of COVID-19 restrictions. The resellers want the organizers to repay the full amount, while the organizers say they'll only refund the face value of the tickets.
Alan Dizdarevic, the CEO of U.S. reseller CoSport, which added a 20 percent service fee, said "there's nothing to give back of the 20 percent, because it's all been spent. There was no profit."
So, as things stand, the purchasers will have to take a hit. For example, an American who spent $1,514 for a pair of tickets to swimming medal events, the face value-only refund was $1,397, a loss of $117, the Journal reports. On its own, that doesn't seem unreasonable for an individual who could afford those tickets in the first place, but when considering that 68,000 Americans (and around 600,000 foreigners total) purchased tickets to the Games, the aggregate consumer loss would be quite high if the hosts and the reseller can't come to some form of agreement.
It's also unclear what will happen to folks who booked hotels. So far, there's no indication Japanese officials are planning to intervene and insist hotels issue refunds for canceled stays, the Journal reports. Read more at The Wall Street Journal. Tim O'Donnell
Subpoenas are coming.
There are now not one, but two grand juries underway in Fulton County, Georgia, where District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating former President Donald Trump for allegedly interfering with and pressuring state election officials as they recounted votes from the 2020 presidential election, The Daily Beast reports. The jurors in the secret proceedings are reportedly expected to issue subpoenas demanding documents and recordings related to the investigation. "I suspect that's in the very near future," Willis told The Daily Beast.
Willis does not have an easy task ahead of her. For starters, The Daily Beast notes it's rare for a regional prosecutor to target a former president (although, Trump may be the exception to the rule). But the public integrity unit leading the investigation is also still being assembled after earlier iterations of the unit struggled to achieve success in previous non-Trump-related cases. That said, they do have "a trove of evidence" against Trump, The Daily Beast writes, including phone call recordings already published by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Read more about the investigation and the checkered history of Fulton County's public integrity unit at The Daily Beast. Tim O'Donnell
A few key Senate Democrats don't appear willing to end the legislative filibuster, leaving most of President Biden's legislative priorities at the far edge of probability. But Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) thinks he may have found "a magical parliamentary trick" to get Democrats at least one more legislative win in the 50-50 Senate, Politico reports. It involves budget reconciliation and an obscure section of the 1974 Congressional Budget Act.
"If you know one thing about the arcane subject of budget reconciliation, it's that it can be used to pass legislation through the Senate with just 51 votes," and "if you know two things, it's the simple majority rule and that reconciliation can be used only once every fiscal year," Politico explains. Democrats passed their $1.9 trillion stimulus package through the unused fiscal 2021 budget, meaning they can use reconciliation one more time this year, with the 2022 budget.
But if the Senate parliamentarian agrees with Schumer's interpretation of Section 304 of the 1974 budget law, Democrats can amend last year's budget to pass more legislation through reconciliation. "It's not clear how many additional reconciliation opportunities this theory would open up," Axios reports, but it would add at least one more shot at sidestepping the filibuster this year alone.
"No final decision has been made on the legislative strategy," a Schumer aide told Axios. "Schumer wants to maximize his options to allow Senate Democrats multiple pathways to advance President Biden's Build Back Better agenda."
If Democrats do pursue the Section 304 strategy, "the Senate parliamentarian will once again be the most powerful person in Washington," Politico reports. "It goes without saying that this is a bizarre way to govern. Nobody would design a system like this, where to pass even popular legislation senators seek to game a rickety budgeting process and the most important Hill staffers are now the experts on these arcane rules devised in 1974 for the purpose of deficit reduction." You can read the relevant portion of Section 304 at Politico. Peter Weber