Retirees have lost their appetite for Cracker Barrel and Olive Garden since the pandemic — and it’s not clear when they’ll come back, according to the chains’ top brass.
No amount of biscuits and gravy or unlimited pasta refills seems to be enough to entice the 65-and-older crowd as they continue to pinch pennies amid high inflation and duck the coronavirus, according to Rick Cardenas, chief executive of Darden Restaurants, which owns Olive Garden.
“I do believe that they were a little bit more spooked on the COVID side,” Cardenas told analysts on a Thursday conference call. “We’d love to see them come back more frequently.”
Indeed, seniors are heading to the budget-friendly pasta chain less often than they had before the pandemic, added chief financial officer Raj Vennam on a conference call on Thursday with Wall Street analysts.
He pointed to a “slight decline” in their numbers from the previous quarter. Olive Garden’s restaurants are hoping to lure customers in the coming weeks as it reintroduces its wildly popular Never Ending Pasta Bowl promotion on Sept. 25 through Nov. 19 at a price of $13.99.
Last year, Olive Garden staged the promotion at the first time since the pandemic at the same price — up from $10.99 in 2019. Adding unlimited meat toppings now costs an extra $4.99.
The chain is hardly alone in its struggles to get seniors into seats. Cracker Barrel, which lost a chunk of its older customers over the past couple of years, said that many of them appear to have vanished for good.
“We just have not yet recovered the visits with that group [over 65 years-old] to the extent we thought we would, really since the pandemic,” Cracker Barrel chief executive Sandra Cochran said during an earnings call with analysts last week.
Both companies flagged customer traffic declines in their most recent earnings reports, with Darden mentioning inflation 41 times on its call.
There is still a small but meaningful group of people who haven’t returned to in-store dining,” restaurant analyst, Mark Kalinowski told The Post. “About 10% of the overall restaurant customer base hasn’t come back and the majority are older diners.”
Tennessee-based Cracker Barrel may have lost other customers as well when it posted a photo of a rainbow colored rocking chair at one of its restaurants during Pride Month.
“Everyone is always welcome at our table (and our rainbow rocker),” Cracker Barrel captioned the photo. in June.
The post went viral immediately with some customers threatening to boycott the 54 year-old chain.
“Does Cracker Barrel have any idea who its customers are? It’s as easy to stop going to Cracker Barrel as it is to stop buying Bud Light,” according to a post.
Last year, customers accused the chain for going “woke” after it introduced plant-based sausage.
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