I guess this is old news now, but I don’t remember reading it before. Red Lobster planned an all-you-can-eat crab special that cost them boatloads of dollars and they had to fire their president.

“It was kind of the worst of all worlds,” one senior Darden executive remarked as the casual-dining giant said Red Lobster management had badly miscalculated how many times customers would take the chain at its word and eat all they wanted – at a time when crab costs were going up.

“It wasn’t the second helping on all-you-can-eat but the third,” said company chairman Joe R. Lee. “And maybe the fourth,” added Dick Rivera, company president and chief operating officer, on a conference call after the market Wednesday.