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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Red Robin Died by Spreadsheet. Don't Make the Same Mistake
7777777phil wrote 2 hours 52 min ago:
85% increase in walkaways is what happens when you optimize a
spreadsheet line item without understanding why it exists.
Bussers aren't a cost center, they're part of what makes the dining
experience work as a whole for most people...
Nike did this exact same thing with athlete partnerships and marketing:
HTML [1]: https://philippdubach.com/posts/nikes-crisis-and-the-economics...
jmpman wrote 6 hours 55 min ago:
I'd like to see more companies have clawback compensation for these
"bold" decisions - stuff goes wrong, we are clawing back all your
stock, even the tranche which vested during the first quarter pump and
dump scam.
And I'd like to see it implemented further down in the hierarchy. In
the companies which just implemented layoffs for AI efficiency, and
then asked their more senior employees to dig in and help on the now
overflowing work - I suspect a mid level manager or VP made that
decision and was wildly rewarded for the initial cost savings, and now,
with the resource disaster - was their bonus clawed back? I suspect
not.
renewiltord wrote 5 hours 13 min ago:
All that stuff is just the same approach but applied to the CEO.
Youâve just got the same mindset.
By contrast TSLA gives Elon options in the money if he 10x valuation.
And he did.
This punishment and austerity approach is doomed.
silisili wrote 5 hours 42 min ago:
Same.
This will never change until CEO pay is tied to long term
performance. Why not make it 5 year lagging?
The whole problem is that CEOs have zero incentive to care about the
longevity of the company. They want share price to go up now, make
their money, then cash out.
It's easy to blame the CEOs, but they're just doing what's smart for
them. We need to change the definition of what that is.
Suppafly wrote 7 hours 1 min ago:
>None of it addressed the core issue: theyâd trained an entire
generation of customers to think of Red Robin as the place where
service is terrible.
100% this.
Topgamer7 wrote 7 hours 10 min ago:
I stopped going to red robin after they gave me food poisoning
iancmceachern wrote 5 hours 30 min ago:
If I did this for every chain that this happened at I wouldn't have
any chains left to eat at.
cheschire wrote 4 hours 44 min ago:
Iâm not sure that would be a net loss. I would be shocked to hear
of an area of the world that only has chain restaurants and nothing
else.
dawnerd wrote 8 hours 10 min ago:
We used to go weekly. Then sometime in 2018-2019 service went downhill
fast. It would take forever to get a seat despite not being busy. It
would take forever to get service once seated. The endless fries never
came or when they did they looked like they were grabbed from another
table.
Then their rewards were gutted. We've only been back a handful of times
and every time was worse and now we go elsewhere entirely.
pockybum522 wrote 8 hours 17 min ago:
I'm getting browser not supported for the latest version of opera on
Android.
warmedcookie wrote 9 hours 22 min ago:
Is it wishful thinking for Microsoft to reflect on their Windows 11 UX
mistakes and turn around like Chilis did?
AndrewKemendo wrote 9 hours 55 min ago:
> looked brilliant on the quarterly earnings call. He fired all the
bussers. Eliminated expeditors. Replaced kitchen managers with generic
âback-of-houseâ roles. This was what seemed obvious at the time:
Labor costs were rising, so remove labor. The savings showed up
immediately.
I can only assume that the CEO and none of the management had ever
actually worked front or back of house.
Anybody who has would know that eliminating expo and busers would
destroy service.
This is just pure incompetence across the board, saying that it looked
brilliant or obvious is the exact opposite of how it looks.
hyperman1 wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
Farmers have a saying: Eating the seed grain.
hakfoo wrote 10 hours 13 min ago:
The weird thing is that my family has started going to Red Robin
recently. They started doing one thing right at least.
Their recent $9.99-with-drink special happens to be pretty exactly what
most of our party wants when we go to a burger place. Who are the
people who want the burgers with the 25 exotic toppings? It doesn't
beat the local institution with the big wood-coal grill, but that place
is 25km further away, and a few dollars per head more, so it's the
"let's have an okay lunch and then finish our Saturday errands" choice.
It's not packed, but at least at the locations near us, the management
seems to be very attentive-- like they're trying to at least keep an
eye on the customer experience after blowing it up.
TBH, I think the meal special INCLUDING a drink is a very smart
direction for for both RR and Chili's. I suspect that consumers are
getting wise to the "hide the queen" pricing tricks, where they bury
the costs of loss-leader entrees in the side or drink. There aren't
many places our family of four can get a sit-down lunch for less than
USD60 before tip, and RR is one of them.
trollbridge wrote 11 hours 5 min ago:
It's frustrating to see all the tells of AI-generated or AI-edited
writing (such as phrases like this:
Kevin Hochman took over Chiliâs in 2022 and did the opposite of
what Red Robin did. He simplified the menu. Invested in operations.
Launched a $10.99 deal that went viral on TikTok. Let the food speak
for itself.
(Multiple sentences that don't start with a subject and just start with
a verb,) and:
I wrote about this in Boil the Oceans. Weâre at an inflection point
where the old playbook, eking out 5% efficiency gains, increasing
profit margins 2% by lowering cost and firing people, isnât just
insufficient. Itâs suicide.
("Thing isn't just X. It's Y.", another LLM tell.)
I had to double-check who the author was to make sure it was worth
reading, since Garry Tan's stuff normally is, but I generally have a
habit of avoiding spending much time reading LLM output, particularly
that claims to have amazing business insight but suspiciously is
telling me what I want to hear.
rdiddly wrote 5 hours 30 min ago:
You're probably right but I no longer try to guess what's AI-written.
LLMs learned all their bad habits from humans in the first place
after all. But for sure I can still tell good writing from shit, so
that's how I still look at it. I'd venture very little truly good
writing is AI-written, and a lot of shit writing is. So maybe I'm
rejecting roughly the same set of things, but just the fact that a
thing intrinsically sucks, is enough information for me to act on. I
dunno if I'm making sense or why I'm even commenting. Thanks for
reading.
plorkyeran wrote 7 hours 14 min ago:
Itâs not LLM-generated, just simple plagiarism and bad editing.
Click through to the quoted tweet at the start of the article and
youâll get the article with less awkward English and without the
bolted-on conclusion. In the original tweet that sentence is:
Kevin Hochman took over Chiliâs in 2022 and did the opposite of
what Red Robin did. He simplified the menu, invested in operations,
launched a $10.99 â3 for Meâ deal that went viral on TikTok, and
let the food speak for itself.
Garryâs contribution was to replace the commas with periods.
DangitBobby wrote 8 hours 25 min ago:
Also the intro paragraph is basically nonsense, unsupported by the
body of the story.
> The fear of the future is directly proportional to how small your
ambitions are. If your plan is to keep doing exactly what youâre
doing, any change is terrifying. If your plan is dramatically bigger,
change is the best news youâve ever gotten.
Red Robin's problem wasn't "not adapting" to change. The opposite, in
fact. They tried to capitalize on change at the cost of very obvious
fundamentals and fumbled the ball. Greedy and incompetent.
protimewaster wrote 7 hours 24 min ago:
It just doesn't seem super well written. It presents a story from
2018 as if it's the impetus for the decline, and then talks about a
decade long decline. If it's been declining for a decade, how is a
decision from 8 years ago responsible for it?
I mean, it does sound like it was a bad decision, but not so bad
that it could retroactively be responsible for 10 years of decline.
DougN7 wrote 9 hours 39 min ago:
Maybe Iâm too naive but I can never tell when something is written
by AI. If it works with next most likely token, doesnât that mean
it has encountered the patterns youâre picking out in lots and lots
of text written by humans? Please educate me if Iâm wrong.
JCharante wrote 4 hours 55 min ago:
> it has encountered the patterns youâre picking out in lots and
lots of text written by humans?
In pre-training data, yes
There are post-training datasets, where the weights are changed to
conform to human preference. These datasets are created by groups
of thousands of people all following a 40-page guide, and these
guides have example. People over-index on these examples and so
sample sentences with these structures are over represented in
these datasets and used for post-training.
jinushaun wrote 7 hours 49 min ago:
Same. Feels like âAI slopâ was trained on my personal writing
style. The quoted text from the article writes with the same voice
as mine.
matwood wrote 6 hours 58 min ago:
Same. Everyone wants to feel smart by trying to point out that
every piece of writing is AI generated now, but most of us
(myself included) are just average writers. All of the LLMs
generate phrasing I often use.
chuckadams wrote 11 hours 1 min ago:
"Not just" is apparently the new emdash.
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