If you happen to ever needed to purchase a lobster tank and an industrial freezer, now’s the time.
Gear from greater than 50 Pink Lobster eating places throughout the USA was up for public sale on Tuesday, a liquidator stated, because the embattled seafood chain’s web site listed dozens of areas as being briefly closed.
The public sale web site consists of grainy footage of freezers, ovens, blenders and different gadgets. A photograph of a tank with dwell lobsters appeared within the itemizing for the Pink Lobster in Redding, Calif., together with pictures of a bar with whiskey bottles and a fridge stocked with wine and beer.
The auctions have been scheduled to finish on Thursday, and gadgets should be picked up on Friday, in response to the liquidator, TAGeX Manufacturers. Whoever who wins the bid for a specific restaurant will obtain all the pieces inside it (not together with perishable items and alcohol, the public sale web site famous).
Pink Lobster didn’t reply to inquiries Tuesday morning.
Pink Lobster, primarily based in Orlando, Fla., opened its first location in 1968 and now has eating places throughout the USA, plus others in Asia and Latin America. Its décor was impressed by Bar Harbor, a coastal city in Maine.
Pink Lobster continues to be an American establishment, but it surely has been shedding cash for some time. Final yr, its determination to drastically broaden an all-you-can-eat shrimp promotion contributed to an $11 million quarterly working loss.
Bloomberg Information reported final month that Pink Lobster was seeking to restructure its debt and contemplating whether or not to file for chapter. The corporate didn’t remark for that article.
For a lot of American households, Pink Lobster has lengthy been an aspirational eating selection, and for some an introduction to seafood. Within the late Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, its emblem marketed the restaurant as a cocktail lounge with an oyster bar.
Pink Lobster has additionally filtered into American fashionable tradition, together with within the 1996 Adam Sandler comedy “Completely satisfied Gilmore” and the 2016 Beyoncé track “Formation,” during which she sang about taking a romantic companion to the restaurant.
Basic Mills bought the chain in 1970. It was later owned by Darden Eating places, a Basic Mills subsidiary, and was bought by Golden Gate Capital, a non-public fairness agency, in 2014.
Pink Lobster’s largest shareholder since 2020 has been Thai Union Group, a seafood conglomerate primarily based in Thailand. That firm introduced in January that it had determined to exit its Pink Lobster funding. It later stated that it had written down its $530 million stake.
Thai Union stated in its January announcement that Pink Lobster had been harm by the coronavirus pandemic, greater rates of interest, rising labor and materials prices, and “sustained trade headwinds.” It stated in a quick e-mail on Tuesday that it was nonetheless within the strategy of “exiting its minority funding” and had no additional remark.
One other main shareholder in Pink Lobster is Seafood Alliance, a Belgium-based affiliation of worldwide seafood companies, in response to Thai Union. Seafood Alliance didn’t instantly reply to an inquiry.
Victor Mather contributed reporting.
