I explained the difference in incentives: Restaurant margins are a PE failure [0], that alone would explain it. Your framing of the scenario as "discouraging people from going to a restaurant" is... less than charitable. A better description would be "extracting the value of customer goodwill from the business and moving it into their pockets". They're PE, they prioritize big, fast returns over long-term customer value and small, slow returns.

Add to that, the leveraged buyout mechanism that Red Lobster went through is famous for siphoning value off the target in the form of fees and other schemes, and then leaving the empty husk to die under crippling debt[1]. A clue here is that the 2nd paragraph of the article we're discussing is, "In mid-April, Bloomberg reported the debt-laden seafood chain...", and it sounded like they had trouble paying it in part because of the rent payments that started when the PE firm sold their real estate to pay for the buyout.

Can you explain why you think anything I've said so far is untrue? After all, we can't assume a PE LBO executor and a small business owner have the same incentives unless we have sufficiently convincing evidence to support that assumption.

0: https://www.indeed.com/hire/c/info/restaurant-profit-margins...

1: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/09/corporate-kl...