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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   28126 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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How snail-brained gullible are you exactly?

Recently in the news, Red Lobster is reporting an 11 million dollar loss, which is forcing the company to close many restaurants and possible file for chapter 11. The problem? Their '$20 all you can eat shrimp' deal was too good. Some anecdotal evidence indicates that large tables would order one or two orders of the never-ending deal, causing huge losses as large parties would share a single plate for $20, causing significant restaurant losses.

They couldn't see that one coming at their giant company, that's been running all you can eat deals since my grandmother was taking me there as a kid? This is classic "loser execs blame others for their failures." Every restaurant to ever run an all-you-can-eat deal knows that the first thing you do is say, No Sharing on the menu, on the salad bar, and sometimes a couple other places in the restaurant. "Any Sharing of Salad Bar food will result in an additional salad bar order being charged." My local diner run by a greek dude from Lesbos knows that. How the fuck would Red Lobster not know that? Every all-you-can-eat buffet I've ever been to also reserves the right, on their menu, to cut you off. My concrete contractor and his sons had been thrown out of every smorgasbord in three counties.

And Red Lobster didn't have any kind of metrics tracking the Shrimp deal, to notice that it was causing losses and end it early? This whole debacle beggars belief.

In the past few years, NYC has seen significant increases in retail theft, with stores facing many millions of dollar losses, with the estimate of retail theft being up to 4.4 billion dollars for the state alone.

Which can be directly and obviously traced to the trend towards low-staffing in stores. CVS and Walgreens used to have three to five employees in a normal sized store, and the closest you ever got to "Self Checkout" was my local convenience store where I would wave my Arizona Green Tea at the owner and tell him "I'll just leave the dollar on the counter" so he wouldn't have to get up. Now I go into CVS, and if I need someone I spend five minutes searching the store for the one person working there. And that single employee is almost never at the front desk, where they might at least see me leaving and yell at me, they are nearly always somewhere else in the store, stocking shelves or something. If I wanted to steal some stuff, who the fuck is going to stop me?

To say nothing of self-checkout, which invites casual small-scale theft, even by otherwise honest people. On at least three occasions, I've stolen things in self-checkout by accident. A small item in the bottom of my reusable bag (because they charge me for regular bags), didn't make it out of the bag. At no point have I ever felt like there was any chance that if I chose to steal a few small items I would get caught by the bored employee pretending to watch. To say nothing of, say, buying one 15lb bag of cat food and four 20lb bags, and scanning the 15lb bag five times. Even if I were caught, would the bored teenager at Target really call the cops, or would he just accept I made a mistake and make me ring it up again? It's zero risk.

Why do these companies accept these downsides? Because they'd rather lose goods to shoplifting than pay employees, their losses to self-checkout theft are less than the cost of paying a cashier. They could hire greeters and cart checkers, like Costco does, but they don't, because they lose less to shoplifting than they would have to pay greeters and cart checkers.

These corporations are subsidizing dishonesty, and then hiding behind moralistic bullshit pretending that we're becoming a "low trust society." Horse-hockey. The corporations are the ones creating a world where theft is a zero-consequence problem.

Something I've noted about self checkout is that it has been discontinued in all smaller stores, presumably because they can't have anyone monitoring the process.

Larger stores are all in on it but they have one or multiple people going around making sure people are mostly behaving.

This implies to me that the cost of theft isn't neglible and that there needs to be *some" enforcement (or appearance of enforcement) for it to not get out of hand.

How snail-brained gullible are you exactly?

Is this necessary? Cynicism isn't always a necessary characteristic when reading an earnings report. Jordan Peterson said something that I that I try to take to heart, which is "believe people when they say something is the motivation for their actions." This doesn't mean that their explanation is the real reason for the action, but it is what they believe is the reason behind their actions. Corporate entities have a good reason to not lie on earnings reports and losses (getting sued and/or fired for lack of transparent reporting on earnings), I am willing to take their statements as generally factual, even if corporate stupidity is closer to the real reason.

They couldn't see that one coming at their giant company, that's been running all you can eat deals since my grandmother was taking me there as a kid? This is classic "loser execs blame others for their failures." Every restaurant to ever run an all-you-can-eat deal knows that the first thing you do is say, No Sharing on the menu, on the salad bar, and sometimes a couple other places in the restaurant. "Any Sharing of Salad Bar food will result in an additional salad bar order being charged." My local diner run by a greek dude from Lesbos knows that. How the fuck would Red Lobster not know that? Every all-you-can-eat buffet I've ever been to also reserves the right, on their menu, to cut you off. My concrete contractor and his sons had been thrown out of every smorgasbord in three counties.

And Red Lobster didn't have any kind of metrics tracking the Shrimp deal, to notice that it was causing losses and end it early? This whole debacle beggars belief.

You're correct it could be pure mismanagement of their corporate entity, but this is why selfishness vs trust is an important distinction. Adam Smith understood this concept that self-interest could result in creating public good. A corporation would do something 'good' (offer food for a lower than profitable price) at the goal of customer acquisition. The result was increased popularity and attendance of the restaurant, but at the cost of underestimating the popularity and/or any potential abuse of the deal.

Which can be directly and obviously traced to the trend towards low-staffing in stores. CVS and Walgreens used to have three to five employees in a normal sized store, and the closest you ever got to "Self Checkout" was my local convenience store where I would wave my Arizona Green Tea at the owner and tell him "I'll just leave the dollar on the counter" so he wouldn't have to get up. Now I go into CVS, and if I need someone I spend five minutes searching the store for the one person working there. And that single employee is almost never at the front desk, where they might at least see me leaving and yell at me, they are nearly always somewhere else in the store, stocking shelves or something. If I wanted to steal some stuff, who the fuck is going to stop me?

To say nothing of self-checkout, which invites casual small-scale theft, even by otherwise honest people. On at least three occasions, I've stolen things in self-checkout by accident. A small item in the bottom of my reusable bag (because they charge me for regular bags), didn't make it out of the bag. At no point have I ever felt like there was any chance that if I chose to steal a few small items I would get caught by the bored employee pretending to watch. To say nothing of, say, buying one 15lb bag of cat food and four 20lb bags, and scanning the 15lb bag five times. Even if I were caught, would the bored teenager at Target really call the cops, or would he just accept I made a mistake and make me ring it up again? It's zero risk.

Why do these companies accept these downsides? Because they'd rather lose goods to shoplifting than pay employees, their losses to self-checkout theft are less than the cost of paying a cashier. They could hire greeters and cart checkers, like Costco does, but they don't, because they lose less to shoplifting than they would have to pay greeters and cart checkers.

Companies are not accepting these downsides. Many places I see are now employing full-time security guards to prevent theft, are closing self checkout locations (my local Walmart has closed all self-checkout locations and has people checking customer receipts on exit), and has gates to prevent people leaving without going through a checkout. Any store which is unable to adequately prevent losses are closing. Brooklyn has losing 50 different chain stores in the past year. Companies are reacting to increased theft and are shutting down unprofitable stores. The losses of accidental check out are negligible to people deliberately stealing significant dollar amounts of items from retailers.

They couldn't see that one coming at their giant company, that's been running all you can eat deals since my grandmother was taking me there as a kid? This is classic "loser execs blame others for their failures." Every restaurant to ever run an all-you-can-eat deal knows that the first thing you do is say, No Sharing on the menu, on the salad bar, and sometimes a couple other places in the restaurant. "Any Sharing of Salad Bar food will result in an additional salad bar order being charged." My local diner run by a greek dude from Lesbos knows that. How the fuck would Red Lobster not know that? Every all-you-can-eat buffet I've ever been to also reserves the right, on their menu, to cut you off. My concrete contractor and his sons had been thrown out of every smorgasbord in three counties.

But whose going to enforce this? If the people doing the 10 for 1 buffet option complain wont you have to call the police? And in major metros the police will not respond to such a complaint. And if they did, not for hours.

No, Red Lobster won't call the police immediately when they see 10 people eating 1 buffet option.

In a civilized society it's a series of escalations:

  1. Fine print in the menu will say the buffet deal is only available for 1 person, and the restaurant reserves the right to cutoff any customer at anytime without a given reason.

  2. Now when Red Lobster sees 10 people eating from one buffet option, they have a contract justification to have an employee go over there and gently say, please don't do this.

  3. When that doesn't change behavior, Red Lobster has justification to charge the table for 10 buffet meals with the cheque at the end.

  4. When the table refuses to pay, then Red Lobster has justification to take the table to the small claims court.

  5. When the table refuses to pay in court, NOW finally the cops get involved over criminal behavior

  6. Now jail becomes an option because of breaking big laws

This process can break down at any point due to the enforcers lacking will or ability to straightforwardly enforce the law.

However when the system works, it can enforce numerous arbitrarily small contracts (Red Lobster buffet fine print) with the threat of overwhelming force.

#4 isn't a scalable option, if at all. You'd have to know the person's name and address, which RL would not know when a random group of 10 enters RL. Then you have to have the capacity to file the complaint. The average RL manager might be just competent enough to do that. B serve the defendants (expensive) then you still have to win that case. This takes the time of the manager, plus whatever employee who has to testify. And the employee probably has moved on from the job by then.

Plus cops don't get involved in people not paying small claims fees most of the time. We're at best some sort of hold on a person's bank account, and I suspect most of these red lobster fellows prefer the currency exchange and pillows.

Hmm good point.

If this is a serious problem maybe the company would require legal identification and/or a bank account demonstrating sufficient funds before they engage with customers. Which would be inconvenient for everyone if the policy was applied equitably.

Or maybe Red Lobster could cooperate with one of those governments that have a facial recognition based social credit score to identify non-cooperative persons.

This takes the time of the manager, plus whatever employee who has to testify

It's okay to take time and expense to punish wrongdoing. The whole basis of revenge is that it's kinda non-rational after the crime is already committed. But the ability to pre-commit to revenge means that rational agents won't mess with you to find out.

The higher levels should get far less usage because the threat of higher-level punishment prevents rational agents from non-compliance. I concede that this doesn't seem to be how current legal systems are setup. Also I'm not a lawyer and I'm just spitballing fantasy systems on an internet forum.

I don't know. I was also really surprised that Red Lobster could somehow botch a standard all-you-can-eat deal to the point of bankrupcy. Restaurants have been doing all-you-can-eat deals since 1947, and Red Lobster has been successfully operating restaurants since 1968. Why would all-you-can-eat suddenly have become unenforceable to the degree that Red Lobster can go bankrupt from it, when this doesn't seem to be a previously established pattern? Did something change about the enforceability of such deals? Something really does smell fishy, here.

Because they'd rather lose goods to shoplifting than pay employees

They've been telling their employees NOT to interfere with robbers, this isn't a matter of penny-pinching. Plug 'employee fired for obstructing theft in store' into your search engine.

Nor does law enforcement care to crack down on basics like robberies, car theft, vagrants, drug dealing and so on (unless of course Xi Xingping is coming to town). See the open air drug markets in US cities, or how some US train stations are used for enjoying narcotics rather than travelling by train: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-the-deadly-use-of-drugs-on-metro-trains

It's not just corporations, it's a breakdown in society generally. The corporations don't want theft of their products but they're clearly more afraid of inconveniencing criminals, just like every other institution.

How snail-brained gullible are you exactly?

This was an unnecessarily antagonistic comment in an otherwise fine post.

It seems far more plausible that Red Lobster unleashed unlimited shrimp as a last stand to stay open, hoping it would be a loss-leader that would enable them to pay off whatever debt they had to go into to run it, and that they were in dire straights to even consider it. If unlimited shrimp was the only problem they would have simply revoked the deal and moved on.

"People don't drink that much anymore" seems like a far more plausible explaination -- tables eating free shrimp all night is no problem if they are also getting hammered on $12 Crantinis or whatnot. I could believe that R.L. was slow to update their business model to take this into account I suppose.

Yeah, they probably assumed somebody eating unlimited shrimp would, on average, drink 3 $5 bud lightscoors lights and an $8 winearita, and that it would be a loss leader for that reason. But to run that deal I suspect they were already looking at some bad numbers and desperately trying to get people in the door to do their $5 light beer drinking at RL instead of chilis.

This is a great response, except for:

How snail-brained gullible are you exactly?

Despite the rest of your post being high-quality and very thought-provoking (which is why I gave it an upvote), I'm seriously inclined to also click the 'report' button for antagonistic/unkind. Taking Red Lobster's press release at its word (or at least assuming that the all-you-can-eat shrimp is partially responsible for their losses) is fine, especially in service of introducing a discussion-worthy topic for conversation.

OTOH, the OP taking Red Lobster at its word is a bit ironic, given the broader point about a low-trust society.

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