MGT301

More Lobster for Red Lobster

Posted on by leticia30121f14

Red_Lobster_Cross_County_Shopping_Center_April_2012.jpg

Americans go to Red Lobster with the intention of indulging in various forms of seafood, but would you ever dare to try a plate of pork chops at Red Lobster?  Not surprisingly, Red Lobster’s sales have been dwindling down in the past few years for this very reason.  Red Lobster was failing to supply their core customers’ demands and was instead trying to appeal to everyone.

Red Lobster was previously owned by Darden Restaurants, the famous owners of American’s favorite food chains such as Olive Garden, Longhorn Steakhouse, Bahama Breeze, and Seasons52.  Recently however, Darden Restaurants decided to drop Red Lobster from their lineup and thus Red Lobster decided to rebrand their image and revamp their menu under their new owners the Golden Gate Capital Group.

As a Band-Aid, their “quick fix” Red Lobster turned to handing out promotional deals.  Hoping to grab there past customer’s attention, the lobster chain ended up overwhelming their customers and failed in achieving their goal of increasing sales.

From thorough research conducted, Red Lobster claimed, “while we had the seafood our guests crave, we didn’t have the right kind of seafood, enough of a presence of lobster.” Red Lobster believes it has found its new solution in creating a new menu.  Red Lobster’s new menu is claiming to cater to their customers’ demands by raising the amount of lobster presence from 75 percent to 85 percent and including refreshing new dishes such as Lobster Tacos and Roasted Maine Lobster Bake.

Oddly enough there was not enough lobster at Red Lobster.  Customers would choose to dine at Red Lobster with the intention of eating seafood not chicken linguine.  Some of the dishes on the menu were not even closely related to seafood and did not contain any seafood.  It is understandable that Red Lobster would want to cater to people with dietary limitations; however, it is hard to understand why there would be a demand for pork chops at a seafood restaurant.

In another attempt to make their menu more appealing, Red Lobster has decided to change their layout.  Red Lobster has eliminated the text heavy format and opted for a two-page fold with more pictures.  Their research has shown that a more navigable menu would make the environment and dining experience more appealing.

Red Lobster’s president Salli Setta claimed, “We want to be not just the biggest seafood restaurant, but the best seafood restaurant.”  This is quite a large goal for a restaurant that is suffering from years of bad sales.

Red Lobster’s new take on their menu could help but can it really turn the company around?  When was the last time you dined in at Red Lobster? Have you noticed any positive or negative differences in the food chain?

Sources:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2014/11/03/red-lobsters-plan-to-win-you-back-more-lobster/?tid=pm_business_pop

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/os-red-lobster-menu-20141103-story.html

How Effective is Complaining?

Posted on by virginia30123f14

I am sure most of us have experienced people complaining about others not doing their jobs correctly as a way to solve an issue at work and I wonder how effective this really is. I currently work at my dad’s high end electronics company and many people will send out office-wide emails pointing out mistakes people have made to encourage others to not do the same. For example, we have a tool sign in/out spreadsheet on Google Docs where installers, or anyone using tools is supposed to sign in or out the tool when they use it. This is to reduce loss of tools or to find out who is responsible for the loss of a tool. Recently, one of the employees in charge of tools has been sending out emails calling out those who have not been using the tool sign in/out sheet properly or have not been using it when they should have.  It is hard to tell if this has been effective since he has only started doing this recently, but people are still not using the tool spreadsheet as often as they need to be.

 

Although I cannot determine how effective this has been, recently my mom who also works at my dad’s company has started calling people who had not filled out their schedules at the end of the day and has been sending out emails based on how many people filled out their schedules like they were supposed to. After about a week of this thorough checking in on people, we finally had a day where everyone filled out their schedules. This did not take very long to see significant results. One possible reason that this worked better than the complaints about the tool spreadsheet was because it was done in a kinder way, rather than calling people out to everyone in the office. My mom kindly called people to ask them to fill out their schedule rather than being upset with them. Another possible reason this worked better was because it was more targeted at the people who were not doing what they were supposed to do. Rather than just sending out an email, they actually got a direct phone call which is much harder to ignore. Also, this could have been more effective because my mom is the boss’ wife so people are more motivated to listen to her because she has more leverage in the company. Although this was more effective, it was also more time consuming.

 

There are many ways to complain to try and get people to cooperate in the workplace, some may be affective and others not. Although some may be affective, they may have other affects as well such as others seeing the complainer in a negative light. However, sometimes it is justified because people need to understand that they cannot continue to slack off because it affects everyone else’s work.

 

Do you think sometimes complaining is necessary? If so, in what way? If not, why not?

 

Why do you think my mom’s method was affective?

 

What are some other methods to get people to do what they need to do?

Retail Job Management Issues

Posted on by virginia30123f14

For about a year and a half, during the end of high school and the beginning of college, I worked at GameStop. During that time I had three different managers and many different assistant managers. After learning more about operations management, I can reflect on what my managers did well and did poorly. Some of the things that were managed poorly explain why I did not enjoy working there a lot of the time.

One of the main issues at GameStop was what tasks were seen as higher importance than others. As an associate, my job was to work the register and to organize and put away games on the shelves. I found that the other associates would waste their time chatting while I was always sure to work on organizing games when I was not at the register. Whenever I would work, the store started off as a mess and I would get it organized while I was there. The problem here was that no one was being told that they should stop standing around and actually put games away. My managers would always complain to me that the other employees would not organize well, but did nothing about it.

Although I was always on task, I ended up being told that I was not doing well because my sales numbers were not high enough. Some days I would get great numbers, but other days I would not, which showed that what customers buy is not completely dependent on me and how I sell the game, but much more the customers decision. I do understand that selling the games and memberships is of high importance, but I think my managers could have focused on more than just numbers when it comes to employee reviews.

These complaints bugged me and gave me less motivation to work hard, but what I really thought was a poor decision was how my manager decided to schedule me and the other employees at my level. It was clear that I was better at organizing the store and that the other associates were better at selling. Since my numbers were not great, my manager decided to put me on the schedule for busy nights so I could get better at selling, thus pushing the other employees to less busy days. While it is good to learn and get better at what we are not good at, I think it would have made much more sense to put me on the less busy nights so I could focus on getting the store organized and fixing and cleaning up what other employees had organized poorly. The result of the new schedule was that the store was a mess because I had no time to clean it and we did not get great numbers because I was not skilled at that.

Do you think it is more important to have employees improve on what they are not good at or is it better to delegate tasks according to skill level, in order to have higher productivity levels?