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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe I’m too naive but I can never tell when something is written by AI. If it works with next most likely token, doesn’t that mean it has encountered the patterns you’re picking out in lots and lots of text written by humans? Please educate me if I’m wrong.
"Not just" is apparently the new emdash.
> 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.