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The fishy death of Red Lobster

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Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#291

Post by mikrl »

emptysongglass wrote: post #248
wvenable wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in a time where almost everything is getting worse. Products are getting smaller, service is getting worse, businesses are closing, quality is going down. I don't think I've ever experienced such an obvious decline in commercial society in my entire life. Is it the financialization of everything? Is that we reached peak growth and profit increases are only possibly through extreme optimization? Is it financia…

Oh man I FEEL this deeply. I was just wondering if it's just me feeling like everything is on a highway to terrible. - Prices in my city, just this year, have felt like they've jumped 10 or 15 percent. - I've been working in tech for a decade now and for the first time a new company simply refused to negotiate salary. - I feel financially worse off than 5 years ago making a third of what I make now. - Housing prices…

> Gen Z is looking like the most garbage generation of the last two centuries

Have you ever met a millennial?

t. 1992 cusper

Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#292

Post by mattgreenrocks »

emptysongglass wrote: post #248
wvenable wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in a time where almost everything is getting worse. Products are getting smaller, service is getting worse, businesses are closing, quality is going down. I don't think I've ever experienced such an obvious decline in commercial society in my entire life. Is it the financialization of everything? Is that we reached peak growth and profit increases are only possibly through extreme optimization? Is it financia…

Oh man I FEEL this deeply. I was just wondering if it's just me feeling like everything is on a highway to terrible. - Prices in my city, just this year, have felt like they've jumped 10 or 15 percent. - I've been working in tech for a decade now and for the first time a new company simply refused to negotiate salary. - I feel financially worse off than 5 years ago making a third of what I make now. - Housing prices…

> Gen Z is looking like the most garbage generation of the last two centuries with more mental illness than any generation in history.

I'm not at all Gen Z (late Gen X), but you can't put all of that on them. They've had many formative years during a lot of the points you've listed.

> Can someone tell me everything is going to get better?

That's never guaranteed. You can only control what you take in, how you cognitively frame it, and how you react to it.

Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#293

Post by nickpsecurity »

quantified wrote: post #283
nickpsecurity wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people used to believe in Jesus Christ with values built on the Bible. That was true from lay people to Ivy League colleges to even folks in prison. His blessings with His accountability both made many good things happen and limited lots of damage we’d cause. America was prosperous as the Bible said it would be. Over the decades, people turned away from God and those values to chase new ones: money first, pleasu…

When and where did that really ever work? Evidence please. The bible says nothing about America. I assume that abolishing slavery was where we turned away from biblical principles.

You don’t even really need it. You can go right to the roots.

Let’s compare two sets of things on a basic level.

1. You know God will judge what good or evil you did at the end of your life. You factor that into your decisions.

2. You think we’re an accident, nothing matters, people are just over animals, actually just chemical reactions, universe itself disappears in enough time, nothing matters in the long term unless you say so, and no accountability for any horrible thing you did.

Which is more likely to lead to righteous behavior? Which is more likely to lead to destructive behavior?

Next set are Christ’s basic commandments vs the world’s:

1. Love and obey God first. That means truth, justice, avoiding self-destructive behavior, family, and good work ethic. From there, love others as you would yourself in all your interactions with them.

2. Do whatever you want to whoever you want. It might be limited by whatever is popular at the time which will change. The Devil has most media focusing on individualism over family, squeezing max profit out of everything, and chasing pleasures with reckless abandon.

Which of these logically creates more good? Which leads to more damage?

I think we could stop there. The consequences of just those differences in believes are tremendous. Those in set 2 are currently doing the most damage in all areas of life. They include people who identify as Christian but don’t live like it. Lip service.

Whereas, my first-hand experience with hundreds of people following Christ and Biblical teaching is that it’s working. Their problems often come from sin, not obedience.

Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#294

Post by mattgreenrocks »

chankstein38 wrote: post #267
wvenable wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in a time where almost everything is getting worse. Products are getting smaller, service is getting worse, businesses are closing, quality is going down. I don't think I've ever experienced such an obvious decline in commercial society in my entire life. Is it the financialization of everything? Is that we reached peak growth and profit increases are only possibly through extreme optimization? Is it financia…

I've been thinking about this a lot too. It just feels like all ends of the spectrum, for a consumer, are crashing down. Everything is harvesting and selling data, stock at stores is low and usually favors the generic (and sometimes lesser) option over the higher quality names... Apps like facebook, twitter, IG, tiktok, reddit, and youtube are making life worse for their users. Overall, it is kind of a depressing tim…

It is usually from the wreckage that the next big things emerge.

Just how these things work.

Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#295

Post by tzs »

whartung wrote: post #156
zikduruqe wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M&M Mars here in the US has been buying up the independent veterinary practices and turning them into corporate run businesses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Inc.#Mars_Petcare

Out here, they’re all being bought up by VCA. My vet is absolutely considering selling his practice. We (selfishly, not seriously) suggested selling his practice and then opening a new one closer to where we live. (We moved out of the area several years ago, but continue to drag the cats in to see him.) We said it in gest but he said he was already giving it serious consideration. When he bought his practice from the…

VCA was bought by Mars in 2017 and operates as a subsidary.

Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#296

Post by rchaud »

singleshot_ wrote: post #129
maerF0x0 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's rooted in societal culture and what people incentivize (ie assign the highest multiple to). Until Americans take on a mindset of longterm/family (as I've seen many Chinese families express), they'll be doomed to make short term decisions. Right now very few Americans are able to accept an optimization that looks like "I invest today, and my grandkids will get the returns". So America is stuck in that local maxim…

It’s very interesting that you seem to be making a dichotomy between Chinese and American people instead of one between rich and poor mindsets.

Plenty of money is being made by taking the short term route. Execs move factories to China and Mexico and they'll get a fat bonus while the workers will see their communities go into decline, and the government starts erecting trade barriers to protect what's left.

Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#297

Post by selimthegrim »

rangerelf wrote: post #109
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep your hands off Olive Garden.

Olive Garden is garbage, why would I want to put my hands on it? Only Olive Garden and Chipotle have managed to give me a stomach ache.

Someone in New Orleans (a town with a large Italian and specifically Sicilian population), left a one-line Yelp review of the one Olive Garden in the metro area (by the airport). "The 9/11 of Italian food"

Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#298

Post by erikerikson »

JackFr wrote: post #138
erikerikson wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then it was reversed, purchased back by the founder for less

Chipotle took on McDonalds as an early investor, used McDonald's investment to quickly expand from 16 to 500 stores. Chipotle had a tremendously successful IPO, which they used to fund further growth. McDonalds, who was always a minority investor, divested themselves from Chiptole earning $1.5 billion on a $450 million investment. It trades on the NYSE as CMG and has a market cap of 88 billion.

Thanks for stimulating me to update

Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#299

Post by yoyohello13 »

jncfhnb wrote: post #169
asdfman123 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increasingly I think the financialization of everything makes us less capable of understanding the world. "Red Lobster failed because of X corporate restructuring," "Red Lobster succeeded due to Y ad campaign." People go to restaurants for reasons completely unrelated to things like that. Those things are important, but just constitute the small slice of reality that can easily be measured. I saw a Twitter thread arg…

But a lot of games are cute and fun to play that do not succeed

I think Stardew filled a niche that wasn't being catered to. There were no Farm Sims that weren't a cash grab released since Farmville. Stardew caught all the people who remembered Harvest Moon fondly.

Re: The fishy death of Red Lobster

#300

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

outop wrote: post #290
stainforth wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think private equity funds could have other end goals when buying a company?

Other end goals than what ? Other end goals than making people happy by serving good quality shrimps for a reasonable price? Obviously they do. Other end goals than making money? Of course they don't. But neither did Ray Kroc, who was extremely upfront about how McDonald's is a business whose strategy is to acquire real estate, funded by burger sales. Neither do the Waltons, who aggressively cut margins on all their…

The example of McDonald's acquiring value through real estate, funded by the business, is pretty poingnant, considering the PE firm here did the exact opposite: sold all the valuable real estate and rented it back from the buyer under crippling rent payments, funded by the business.

Why did the PE firm do that when McDonald's didn't?

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