It's frustrating to see all the tells of AI-generated or AI-edited writing (such as phrases like this:
Kevin Hochman took over Chili’s 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. We’re at an inflection point where the old playbook, eking out 5% efficiency gains, increasing profit margins 2% by lowering cost and firing people, isn’t just insufficient. It’s 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.
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.
> looked brilliant on the quarterly earnings call. He fired all the bussers. Eliminated expeditors. Replaced kitchen managers with generic “back-of-house” 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.
Most likely. Microsoft has pushed out everyone with deep enough knowledge of Windows to ever fix what the new blood has broken.
Windows 7 was likely an accident that will never be repeated, their lightning in a bottle OS.
They're at the point where the only way it can be fixed would be for a visionary CEO to be elected who will scrap Windows 11 and pay to rewrite the OS from the ground up in tandem with hardware manufacturers to scalpel out all of the Windows NT cruft and copilot/ai shit and rebuild from the ground up a Windows 12 that might possibly hearken back to the glory days and then charge us, the user, for the OS license again.
I am just as likely to win the Powerball tonight as that is to happen.
Windows is dead, Microsoft just doesn't believe it yet.
Employee costs went up. Red Robin cut staff. Chili's on the other hand hired more people. Wait times at Red Robin went up and people stopped going there. Red Robin stock price tanked. Opposite happened at Chili's.
There you go. Is that the whole story? No, but honestly I suspect the article isn't the whole story either.
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.
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.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 40.7 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
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.
Windows 7 was likely an accident that will never be repeated, their lightning in a bottle OS.
They're at the point where the only way it can be fixed would be for a visionary CEO to be elected who will scrap Windows 11 and pay to rewrite the OS from the ground up in tandem with hardware manufacturers to scalpel out all of the Windows NT cruft and copilot/ai shit and rebuild from the ground up a Windows 12 that might possibly hearken back to the glory days and then charge us, the user, for the OS license again.
I am just as likely to win the Powerball tonight as that is to happen.
Windows is dead, Microsoft just doesn't believe it yet.
There you go. Is that the whole story? No, but honestly I suspect the article isn't the whole story either.
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.
100% this.
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.
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: https://philippdubach.com/posts/nikes-crisis-and-the-economi...
Huh. What kind of experience does this website offer on the subject of spreadsheets such that it has _any_ browser requirements?
[Dino MacBook Air with Safari 15.6]
Human CEO made bad decision. Human CEO at another company made good decision. Neither decision had anything whatsoever to do with AI.
Perhaps the author is worried nothing he has to say is interesting without buzzwords.