Updated:

Jan 14, 2019

Original:

Jul 30, 2008

Lack of Irish Luck for Bennigan's

Author:

The parent company of Bennigan's, the Irish-themed casual dining place, filed for bankruptcy yesterday, resulting in the closing of 200 Bennigan's sites along with the 50 remaining restaurants of sister spin-off, Steak and Ale.
However, the 138 franchisee-owned restaurants are expected to remain open, though their future is uncertain without the support of the parent company, Metromedia Restaurant Group.
The casual, mid-price dining segment of the industry has struggled badly in recent times because of higher ingredient and labor costs coupled with downturns in consumer spending. People are dining out less or switching to fast food joints to save money.
I never was a fan of Bennigan's, with my preferred casual dining chain currently being The Cheesecake Factory (On a side note, if you are a Cheesecake Factory fan, they are offering $1.50 slices of cheesecake today to celebrate their 30th anniversary). Applebee's, which truly turns my stomach, is extremely popular near me because our local spot offers half-price appetizers after 10 pm, making it the perfect, cheap munchies food. Other than that after 10 pm traffic, I doubt they are getting many diners. Or at least I hope they aren't.
--Food Services Correspondent Travis

March Madness has been a disaster: two of my best customers, who know each other, combined to go 2-for-39 on the first two weekends. Faithful Assistant has been laughing at their tought breaks, but I've been trying to soothe them. I need these guys to keep playing, losing, and paying. Their luck really has been atrocious. 18 of the losses have been by three points or less. One of them asked me if I'd ever heard anything worse. I guess there's Tsotomu Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi was on a business trip in Hiroshima when the A-bomb dropped. Wounded, he figured he'd better get out of Dodge ASAP, so he barrelled home the next day – to Nagasaki. I reminded the client that his bad luck paled in comparison to Yamaguchi's, and that Yamaguchi lived another 65 healthy years...plenty of time to make more bets. But now I'm dealing with more than bad luck. These guys have now declared that sports are rigged. This month's point-shaving scandal at Auburn hasn't helped, and it brings others of recent years to mind. The NBA has Tim Donaghy. Overseas, it looks like half the Turkish soccer league is going to jail, and half of Italy has already been. I actually believe that most of sports are on the level. Disagree if you want, that's OK. But what really gets my goat are the people who think the bookies want the games rigged. We don't. If people think the games are fixed, and thus become afraid to bet, I'm out of business. It's the same story for the guy running a poker game or the CEO of a retail brokerage. No faith, no business. There's a really simple reason somebody with the available cash or credit can get down a $500,000 bet on the NFL, but might not be able to easily bet $50 on Wrestlemania: the market can take the $500,000 football bet, adjust the price slightly, and bettors will come for the other side. There is no market for Wrestlemania, because nobody trusts it. So these clients are generally miffed, but also fixated on one game: Syracuse vs. Kansas State. The price started moving 20 minutes before tip when a K-State star was ruled ineligible. These guys took the new price on K-State thinking they got a deal, when it was just the market reacting to information. Well, Syracuse rolled and now it's allegedly a “fix”. Of course it's not a fix—it's just betting dumb with less info than everybody else. They should have checked why the spread was moving. Emotion trumps reason, though, and there was no reasoning with these guys. And maybe that's why these guys bet with me instead of going online somewhere—they're so Old School, the building probably only had one room. If you want to be a pro gambler these days, there's a ton of free information all over the Internet. I'm not saying it's easy to win over time—it's not. But there's a bucket of info out there on any game you want to study, and all sorts of arcane stats to help inform your decisions. And since everyone else is studying, you better too. When I worked in Chicago, we had a good customer who worked at O'Hare. He would bring us out-of-town sports sections that travellers left behind as they boarded planes. We got useful injury information from beat writers in other cities that the rest of the Chicago market just didn't have. That was 20 years ago, but when I tell that story to Faithful Assistant, he usually asks if Orville and Wilbur Wright were flying the planes. He's been on the Internet since middle school, and pretends he can't remember life without it. So I'm not sure what to do with these guys—they bet six times a day, but haven't called since Saturday. I think I'll give them a free bet equivalent to what they lost on Kansas State. I know I don't have to, but I'm not willing to risk losing the business. That's the worst part of all this—and the reason why I'm trying to get out of this racket. I don't just need the customers to lose, I need them to lose slowly and have fun doing it. I'm not a psychiatrist trained to actually convince people that betting really is a random thing for the vast majority of gamblers and losing streaks just happen. I wonder if I should join the Army. I'm not much for getting shot, but I hear the poker games are good. Baseball starts next week and the guys who just bet bases are much easier to deal with. They understand the nature of a game where the very best teams win 65% of their games and the absolute worst teams still win 35% of the time. I can't wait. Anybody know if Tim Tebow needs someone to take his action? He's on every channel, everywhere.

As those of you who took the week off to study are well-aware, Saturday is CFA exam day, for all levels. And while we have complete confidence in all of your abilities, some people have expressed feeling a bit jittery about the test. For the vast majority, those fears, while normal, are unwarranted. You just need to talk it out and should consider this space a safe place to do so. For a smaller group of people, though, your fears are totally founded because, statistically speaking, you will fail. Having said that... Back in January, after Matt found out he'd passed Level 1 (with a perfect score), a conversation occurred at Dealbreaker HQ that went something like this: Me: So are you going to sign up for Level 2? Matt: Eh, I don't think so...I mean, I don't really feel like spending the next 5 months of my life studying, y'know? And then what am I going to do? Wait around another year to take Level 3? Me: Uh....YES, I thought that's exactly what I thought you were going to do. Don't you want to be a CFA charterholder? Don't you want to go to CFA Camp? Matt: Meh. Fast forward to last Thursday, when we're sitting around l'office shooting the shit and someone casually mentions, "I wish I were taking the CFA next week." Unfortunately, said someone is not because he choose not to sign up, strangely forgetting how much he loves standardized tests. That being said, if anyone is scheduled to take Level 2 but a) is suffering performance anxiety and b) wants the opportunity to read another recap of how things panned out for an editor of this site, Matt is happy to go in your place and pass it for you. With two nights of studying he gives himself a 50 percent chance (I think it's closer to 75), you'd get those 8 hours back, and it'd make him really, really happy. If he doesn't get to take Level 2 he's considering the idea of the Connecticut Bar in July. Let him have this.

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