#Lobsterworthy

I have many fond memories of Red Lobster, though none quite on par with what Beyonce describes in her new song "Formation." When a Red Lobster opened near my hometown in the 1980s, it seemed quite the novelty, and my mom and I ate there a lot. I recall celebrating more than one birthday at Red Lobster, pounding cheddar biscuits and topping off my meal with one of those over-the-top desserts found on the menus of so many casual chain restaurants. 

As I got older, I turned my elitist nose up at Red Lobster -- and Olive Garden, and Chili's, and any kind of restaurant built on the out-parcels of strip malls and clustered around the off-ramps of interstate highways. During our honeymoon cruise my wife and I sniggered to ourselves when the Iowa couple across from us at dinner one night whispered in wonder that their entree was "better than Red Lobster." That's who still eats at Red Lobster, I thought: Iowans. (My apologies to Iowans and Red Lobster lovers.)

So chalk it up to childhood nostalgia that I was inclined to defend Red Lobster when it was savaged by critics for failing to spin social media gold out of Beyonce's paean to the postcoital delights afforded by the seafood chain. Marketing and social media experts portrayed Red Lobster as hopelessly out of touch with pop culture and, even worse, unable to connect with minority audiences. The fact is, this opportunity also presented plenty of risk (a good response needed to be clever and relatively clean) and it hardly seems reasonable to expect that Red Lobster's social media team is going to be sitting with its smart phones at the ready every time a superstar recording artist drops a new song or video. The metric that matters most is sales, and those went up in spite of Red Lobster's lackluster response to "Formation."

Here's the thing, though: The world changes fast, so fast that sometimes, by the time we realize what's happened, it's too late to adjust. In 2016, cultural and technological changes happen at warp speed. The Xerox and Hewlett-Packard executives who whiffed on personal computers in the 1970s didn't realize the scale of their blunder for at least another decade or so. Today, social media can destroy careers and reputations in the time it takes for a plane to land. In not much more time than that, business models that served a company or even an entire industry for generations can evaporate. Witness what has happened to taxi drivers the world over thanks to Uber and Lyft.

There's a simple question that should haunt all of us: Will the future look the past? We all know the answer. It's how we act on that knowledge that determines whether we shape history, or become a footnote to it. Red Lobster has to figure out a way to stay relevant, because there simply aren't enough Iowa newlyweds to keep it in business forever.