4 ms·

Red Robin Died by Spreadsheet. Don't Make the Same Mistake

54 points by mooreds 9mo ago

trollbridge 9mo 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 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.
- chuckadams 9mo ago
  "Not just" is apparently the new emdash.
- DougN7 9mo ago
  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.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - jinushaun 9mo ago
    Same. Feels like “AI slop” was trained on my personal writing style. The quoted text from the article writes with the same voice as mine.
    - matwood 9mo 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.
      - hyperhello 9mo ago
        Average isn’t median. LLM writes like it has one testicle.
        DougN7 9mo ago
        Lol - I’m not even sure what that means.
        hyperhello 9mo ago
        Okay, it means that since men have two and women have zero, the average person has one testicle. But if you use “average” as a meaningful guideline, you’re going to have trouble because very few people have one testicle; nearly all have two or zero. Here I am making commentary on the quality of AI writing with an analogy to how AI writes like the average person.
  - JCharante 9mo ago
    > it has encountered the patterns you’re 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.
- DangitBobby 9mo 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 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.
  - protimewaster 9mo 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.
- plorkyeran 9mo ago
  It’s not LLM-generated, just simple plagiarism and bad editing. Click through to the quoted tweet at the start of the article and you’ll get the article with less awkward English and without the bolted-on conclusion. In the original tweet that sentence is: 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. Garry’s contribution was to replace the commas with periods.
  - helpfulfrond 9mo ago
    Wow you're right, it really is plagiarism. The original tweet: https://xcancel.com/aakashgupta/status/2024365923856240790 https://xcancel.com/aakashgupta/status/2024365923856240790
    - deafpolygon 9mo ago
      The original tweet is heavily AI-assisted.
- rdiddly 9mo 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.
hakfoo 9mo 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.
AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
> 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.
- hyperman1 9mo ago
  Farmers have a saying: Eating the seed grain.
warmedcookie 9mo ago
Is it wishful thinking for Microsoft to reflect on their Windows 11 UX mistakes and turn around like Chilis did?
- BizarroLand 9mo ago
  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.
pockybum522 9mo ago
I'm getting browser not supported for the latest version of opera on Android.
- hackeraccount 9mo ago
  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.
dawnerd 9mo 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.
Topgamer7 9mo ago
I stopped going to red robin after they gave me food poisoning
- iancmceachern 9mo ago
  If I did this for every chain that this happened at I wouldn't have any chains left to eat at.
  - cheschire 9mo ago
    I’m 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.
    - iancmceachern 9mo ago
      I agree. On the long road trips we take unfortunately it's the sad reality. There are also large urban areas with nothing but food like this, food deserts. Agreed, it's far from ideal.
Suppafly 9mo ago
>None of it addressed the core issue: they’d trained an entire generation of customers to think of Red Robin as the place where service is terrible. 100% this.
jmpman 9mo 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.
- silisili 9mo 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.
- renewiltord 9mo ago
  All that stuff is just the same approach but applied to the CEO. You’ve 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.
7777777phil 9mo 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: https://philippdubach.com/posts/nikes-crisis-and-the-economics-of-brand-decay/ https://philippdubach.com/posts/nikes-crisis-and-the-economi...
- helpfulfrond 9mo ago
  So that's how Hoka exploded onto shelves!
xtiansimon 9mo ago
406 "Your browser is not supported" 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]
- snypher 9mo ago
  The post is essentially a theft of this tweet; https://xcancel.com/aakashgupta/status/2024365923856240790 https://xcancel.com/aakashgupta/status/2024365923856240790
ivraatiems 9mo ago
This article has literally nothing to do with "The AI Age" but keeps saying it over and over, why? For marketing purposes? It's weird. 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.

54 points by mooreds 9mo 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 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.

chuckadams 9mo ago
"Not just" is apparently the new emdash.
DougN7 9mo ago
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.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- jinushaun 9mo ago
  Same. Feels like “AI slop” was trained on my personal writing style. The quoted text from the article writes with the same voice as mine.
  - matwood 9mo 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.
    - hyperhello 9mo ago
      Average isn’t median. LLM writes like it has one testicle.
      - DougN7 9mo ago
        Lol - I’m not even sure what that means.
        hyperhello 9mo ago
        Okay, it means that since men have two and women have zero, the average person has one testicle. But if you use “average” as a meaningful guideline, you’re going to have trouble because very few people have one testicle; nearly all have two or zero. Here I am making commentary on the quality of AI writing with an analogy to how AI writes like the average person.
- JCharante 9mo ago
  > it has encountered the patterns you’re 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.
DangitBobby 9mo 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 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.
- protimewaster 9mo 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.
plorkyeran 9mo ago
It’s not LLM-generated, just simple plagiarism and bad editing. Click through to the quoted tweet at the start of the article and you’ll get the article with less awkward English and without the bolted-on conclusion. In the original tweet that sentence is: 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. Garry’s contribution was to replace the commas with periods.
- helpfulfrond 9mo ago
  Wow you're right, it really is plagiarism. The original tweet: https://xcancel.com/aakashgupta/status/2024365923856240790 https://xcancel.com/aakashgupta/status/2024365923856240790
  - deafpolygon 9mo ago
    The original tweet is heavily AI-assisted.
rdiddly 9mo 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.

hakfoo 9mo 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.

AndrewKemendo 9mo ago

> 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.

hyperman1 9mo ago
Farmers have a saying: Eating the seed grain.

warmedcookie 9mo ago

Is it wishful thinking for Microsoft to reflect on their Windows 11 UX mistakes and turn around like Chilis did?

BizarroLand 9mo ago
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.

pockybum522 9mo ago

I'm getting browser not supported for the latest version of opera on Android.

hackeraccount 9mo ago
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.

dawnerd 9mo 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.

Topgamer7 9mo ago

I stopped going to red robin after they gave me food poisoning

iancmceachern 9mo ago
If I did this for every chain that this happened at I wouldn't have any chains left to eat at.
- cheschire 9mo ago
  I’m 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.
  - iancmceachern 9mo ago
    I agree. On the long road trips we take unfortunately it's the sad reality. There are also large urban areas with nothing but food like this, food deserts. Agreed, it's far from ideal.

Suppafly 9mo ago

>None of it addressed the core issue: they’d trained an entire generation of customers to think of Red Robin as the place where service is terrible. 100% this.

jmpman 9mo 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.

silisili 9mo 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.
renewiltord 9mo ago
All that stuff is just the same approach but applied to the CEO. You’ve 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.

7777777phil 9mo 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: https://philippdubach.com/posts/nikes-crisis-and-the-economics-of-brand-decay/ https://philippdubach.com/posts/nikes-crisis-and-the-economi...

helpfulfrond 9mo ago
So that's how Hoka exploded onto shelves!

xtiansimon 9mo ago

406 "Your browser is not supported" 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]

snypher 9mo ago
The post is essentially a theft of this tweet; https://xcancel.com/aakashgupta/status/2024365923856240790 https://xcancel.com/aakashgupta/status/2024365923856240790

ivraatiems 9mo ago

This article has literally nothing to do with "The AI Age" but keeps saying it over and over, why? For marketing purposes? It's weird. 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.