A clickbait ad on Facebook led some people to falsely believe Olive Garden is permanently closing all locations.
A rumor has recently spread on Facebook claiming that Olive Garden, a national chain of Italian restaurants, is closing all of its locations.
Google searches about Olive Garden closing have also increased over the past week.
THE QUESTION
Is Olive Garden permanently closing all locations?
THE SOURCES
THE ANSWER
No, Olive Garden is not permanently closing all locations.
WHAT WE FOUND
Neither Olive Garden nor its parent company have made any announcements suggesting Olive Garden will permanently close nationwide anytime soon. Even the source of the rumor doesn’t actually say Olive Garden will close all of its restaurants.
The rumor appears to have originated from a series of Facebook ads captioned either “Closing Time: All The Restaurant Chains Closing” or “Say Goodbye To Breadsticks Forever,” all of which attach pictures of Olive Garden beneath the caption.
While these ads seem to suggest that the Olive Garden chain is permanently closing, the captions and photos are misleading.
Clicking on one of the ads takes you to an article titled “Popular Retail Chains That Are Closing Locations in 2023” on a website called za.investing.com. The article lists hundreds of national retailers and restaurants that it says have closed stores, dedicating a couple of paragraphs and a photo to each.
To see what the article has to say about Olive Garden, you have to keep scrolling until you reach the 191st entry to the list. But the article doesn’t even say Olive Garden is permanently closing; it says that Olive Garden has closed over 40 stores.
“Olive Garden has announced the closure of 45 locations nationwide, mainly due to a decline in customers during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the article says. “Most of these Olive Garden locations were smaller, older locations located in California, New York, Pennsylvania and Florida.”
But that’s not even the full picture. For broader context, according to the 2024 first quarter fiscal report for Darden Restaurants, there were actually 19 more Olive Garden restaurants as of Aug. 27, 2023 than there were a year prior.
Olive Garden’s website lists nine new locations, seven of which are now open and two which are set to open before the end of the year.
Darden Restaurants’ news page says nothing about shutting down Olive Garden locations nationwide. Olive Garden’s news page says “there are no updates at this time.”
VERIFY reached out to Olive Garden for comment but did not hear back by publishing time.
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