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The future of Skippers

Posted: October 7th, 2019, 7:03 am
by Super S
Skippers appears to be transitioning away from their regular restaurants and concentrating on offering food in convenience stores and similar locations. A visit to the Skippers website shows only 7 regular restaurants remaining, with a much longer list of what they call Go Fleet locations. Most of which are in convenience stores, but a few small town supermarkets have these as well.

Worth noting is that their regular restaurants are now only in Washington and Oregon.

Re: The future of Skippers

Posted: October 8th, 2019, 2:00 pm
by Brian Lutz
It seems to me that Skippers has never been particularly good at running restaurants (the one that used to be in Orem UT was pretty nice, but in general most Skipper's locations were old and decrepit) although in general they seem to have a reasonably good product. There doesn't seem to be much demand for fish-and-chips restaurants around here, and most of what demand there is seems to be filled by Ivar's (and even they only have 22 fish bars and 3 full service locations, and no longer have any locations outside of Washington.) I imagine there's a lot less overhead to deal with this way, and gets their product into more locations than they could otherwise. Their bottled sauces also seem to do pretty well in supermarkets.

Re: The future of Skippers

Posted: October 8th, 2019, 7:32 pm
by Super S
Brian Lutz wrote: October 8th, 2019, 2:00 pm It seems to me that Skippers has never been particularly good at running restaurants (the one that used to be in Orem UT was pretty nice, but in general most Skipper's locations were old and decrepit) although in general they seem to have a reasonably good product. There doesn't seem to be much demand for fish-and-chips restaurants around here, and most of what demand there is seems to be filled by Ivar's (and even they only have 22 fish bars and 3 full service locations, and no longer have any locations outside of Washington.) I imagine there's a lot less overhead to deal with this way, and gets their product into more locations than they could otherwise. Their bottled sauces also seem to do pretty well in supermarkets.
A lot of the Skippers locations were older, some were in better shape than others. What is left though is pretty much run by franchise operators. The experience was inconsistent though. Longview's recently closed Skipper's (which was a newer strip mall location) had the owner present much of the time and the food was consistently good. However, a few I have been to were terrible. Two that come to mind are one in Lacey a few years ago, the food didn't seem as good as a typical Skippers, and one near Vancouver Mall (which closed years ago) where I remember an employee cussing at the top of his lungs as he filled the ice machine and did other tasks, and I demanded and got a refund when I saw them scoop up clam chowder from a cold pot and stick in to a microwave.

Ivar's has a higher price point, but I wish they could somehow take over a few of the Skippers locations.