Good day and welcome to WSJ Pro Bankruptcy's Daily Briefing. It's Monday, May 18. In today's briefing, Red Lobster reintroduced its Endless Shrimp promotion in April as part of its post-bankruptcy turnaround effort and has since seen a sales boost, though its long-term impact remains uncertain. Meanwhile, rival low-cost carriers are gobbling up routes once served by Spirit Airlines—an opportunity for rivals to expand at a time when the airline's high-profile implosion has raised questions around the budget business model. And after a second bankruptcy led to the sale of Claire’s to a private-equity firm, the tween accessories retailer reconsiders its longtime bright purple branding after research showed changing aesthetic preferences among Generation Alpha shoppers. 

When Larry Konecny was recruited to Red Lobster in November 2024, he quickly learned the horror stories about the chain’s past Endless Shrimp promotion.

Kitchen workers were overwhelmed preparing mountains of shrimp. Other food orders, at times, would sit in windows too long and get cold, so staff would have to throw them away and remake them, while still cooking more shrimp.

Rules around the promotion irritated customers and servers. Plates couldn’t be refilled until every shrimp was gone, and some servers were tasked with shrimp counting.

Since reintroducing the deal in April, third-party data show that sales have jumped. Whether the promotion can permanently lift the company’s fortunes isn’t clear.

Spirit Airlines’ demise earlier this month threatened to turn Atlantic City International Airport into a virtual ghost town. At the time of its collapse, the budget carrier represented 75% of the airport’s passenger traffic.

Then a competitor sailed in. The day before Spirit shut down, Atlantic City airport director Tim Kroll got on the phone with Breeze Airways, a rival budget player. Hours after Spirit called it quits, Breeze had agreed to fill nearly all of Spirit’s routes there.

Spirit’s permanent grounding on May 2 made it the highest-profile airline casualty in decades—and set off a dash as rival carriers and airports look to fill the void it left behind.

The marketing team faced a decision of a purple kind.

Claire’s, the accessories store and mall staple that has pierced the ears of more than 131 million customers over the decades, had long built its brand with a distinctive shade of bright violet.

But the internal research it had conducted was conclusive. Generation Alpha, Claire’s current target audience of kids born between 2010 and 2024, just didn’t think the color was cool.

“The Gen Alpha girl is just really feminine and not super edgy,” said Michelle Goad, the retailer’s chief brand officer.

A weekslong rout in global government bonds intensified Friday, with fading hopes for a U.S.-Iran peace deal colliding with growing concerns about fiscal policies in two of the world’s largest economies.

Sliding bond prices drove the yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note to its highest level in more than a year, helping pause a stock rally that had just carried the S&P 500 and Nasdaq composite to new records.

Share your tips, suggestions and feedback with the WSJ Pro Bankruptcy team: Alexander Gladstone; Jodi Xu Klein; Akiko Matsuda; Alicia McElhaney; Becky Yerak. 

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