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.
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.
By contrast TSLA gives Elon options in the money if he 10x valuation. And he did.
This punishment and austerity approach is doomed.
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.
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.
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.
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 “3 for Me” deal that went viral on TikTok, and let the food speak for itself.
> The fear of the future is directly proportional to how small your ambitions are. If your plan is to keep doing exactly what you’re doing, any change is terrifying. If your plan is dramatically bigger, change is the best news you’ve 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.
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.
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.
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.