Aside from the annoying commercials and mediocre food, here’s another reason to stop giving your money to Olive Garden. They’re bullshitting you. To your face. Why reward them for it? Unlimited volumes of low-value bread and pasta?
As consumers, we really need to start looking at chain restaurants more critically. McDonald’s tastes the same around the world because they engineer the meals for consistency. It’s “fast food” so we accept that lack of wholesomeness in exchange for convenience. But we should also be questioning how places like Olive Garden and Red Lobster manage that same consistency from PA to Kansas to California. We live under an illusion that all sit-down restaurants with waitstaffs have big kitchens run by skilled chefs. More likely, there are huge regional facilities using corporate-designed recipes to premake and portion sauces, breadsticks, desserts, etc. They freeze and ship the food hundreds of miles to the franchises to be thawed, reheated and assembled per some laminated card full of plus signs and pictograms.
Remember, you are eating for you and your family’s nourishment – to live long, healthy lives with strong bodies and minds. Corporate restaurants are trying to turn a profit. That’s it. They’re run by executives in big cities far away and don’t know you or care about you or your community – no matter how many smiling families they put in their commercials. Twenty years from now, you’ll be suffering the effects of their cheap carbs, fat and preservatives. And Olive Garden will be long gone with your money.
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April 18, 2011 at 9:37 pm
R.D.
In fairness, tell us (again) about someplace local that does the opposite.
April 19, 2011 at 8:23 am
Erik
Any business is in it to make a dollar, but local restaurants with local ownership using local ingredients definitely have a stake in the the community. We’re lucky to have a lot of those in Easton and throughout the Lehigh Valley. All but one link in the list on the left is a restaurant that falls into that category. And they all have to compete with each other using quality and word-of-mouth since they can’t afford huge TV ad buys like Olive Garden’s parent company, Darden Restaurants.
Not mentioned was the fact that these corporate restaurants also support damaging suburban sprawl that destroys local farmland and replaces it with yet another shopping center. Easton’s downtown restaurants are the key to its restoration. Darden would never consider such a location – no room for a huge parking lot or space to pull up the tractor trailers that regularly deliver the processed meals.