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Red Robin Gourmet Burgers is looking to close up to 70 underperforming locations, representing about 14% of the 498 restaurants that were operating as of the end of last year. The company has already closed one restaurant upon lease expiration, it said in an earnings release last week, and it plans to close three additional locations within the first quarter of 2025. Most of the 70 locations are likely to close at some point in the next five years once their leases expire, Restaurant Dive reported, with as many as 15 closing this year. This decision follows a review of the company’s operations, which revealed that these sites are not meeting performance expectations. Red Robin reported a net loss of $39.7 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024, a sharp decline compared to the $13.7 million loss reported in the same period of 2023. Despite this, the company reported a 19% increase in adjusted EBITDA, reflecting the success of its cost-saving measures. Highlights for Q4 and full-year 2024 Total revenues of $1.25 billion for the year, down from $1.3 billion in 2023. Q4 revenues were $285.2 million, down $23.8 million due to one fewer operating week. Comparable restaurant revenue decreased 1.2% for the year, but increased 3.4% in Q4 (1.8% including deferred loyalty revenue impact). Net loss of $77.5 million for the year, compared to a net loss of $21.2 million in 2023. Q4 net loss was $39.7 million, impacted by $32.4 million in impairment and closure costs. Adjusted EBITDA of $38.8 million for the year, down 43.7%, with a 19% increase in Q4 to $12.7 million. Lingering optimism While the closures mark a difficult chapter for the company, Red Robins leadership believes the actions taken will better position it for future growth and profitability. CEO G.J. Hart highlighted the significant improvements in customer traffic, with a 600-basis-point improvement from the first to the fourth quarter. The company is focusing on bringing guests back into restaurants with its “North Star” plan, which aims to boost guest experience and operational efficiency. Red Robin has restaurants in 39 U.S. states and one Canadian province, with its largest presence in California, Washington State, and Colorado. In closing underperforming locations, it would join a growing list of dining chains including Denny’s, Wendy’s, TGI Fridays, and several others that have moved to reduce their footprint in recent months. Shares of Red Robin stock (Nasdaq: RRGB) are down almost 24% in the past 12 months.
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E-Commerce
Crews battled wildfires in North and South Carolina on Sunday amid dry conditions and gusty winds as residents were forced to evacuate in some areas.The National Weather Service warned of increased fire danger in the region due to a combination of critically dry fuels and very low relative humidity.In South Carolina, where more than 175 fires burned 6.6 square miles (17 square kilometers), Gov. Henry McMaster declared a state of emergency on Sunday to support the wildfire response effort, and a statewide burning ban remained in effect.Crews made progress containing a fire in the Carolina Forest area west of the coastal resort city of Myrtle Beach, where residents had been ordered to evacuate several neighborhoods, according to Horry County Fire Rescue. Video showed some people running down the street as smoke filled the sky. But by late Sunday afternoon, the fire department announced that Carolina Forest evacuees could return home.The South Carolina Forestry Commission estimated Sunday evening that the blaze had burned 2.5 square miles (6.5 square kilometers) with 30% of it contained. No structures had succumbed to the blaze and no injuries had been reported as of Sunday morning, officials said.In North Carolina, the U.S. Forest Service said fire crews were working to contain multiple wildfires burning in four forests across the state on Sunday. The largest, about 400 acres (162 hectares), was at Uwharrie National Forest, about 50 miles (80.47 kilometers) east of Charlotte. The Forest Service said Sunday afternoon that it had made progress on the fire, reaching about one-third containment.The small southwestern town of Tryon in Polk County, North Carolina, urged some residents to evacuate Saturday as a fire spread rapidly there. The evacuations remained in effect Sunday. A decision on whether to lift them was expected to be made Monday after intentional burns are set to try to stop the fire from spreading.That fire has burned about 500 acres (202 hectares) as of late Sunday, with zero percent containment, according to the Polk County Emergency Management/Fire Marshal’s office. The North Carolina Forest Service was conducting water drops and back-burning operations on the ground, and area residents should expect a lot of smoke during those operations, officials said.Officials have not said what caused any of the fires.
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E-Commerce
Theres a cat-and-mouse game between those using generative AI chatbots to produce text undetected and those trying to catch them. Many believe they know the telltale signsthough as a journalist fond of the word delve and prone to em-dashes, Im not so sure. Researchers at four U.S. universities, however, have taken a more rigorous approach, identifying linguistic fingerprints that reveal which large language model (LLM) produced a given text. All these chatbots are coming out every day, and we interact with them, but we dont really understand the differences between them, says Mingjie Sun, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University and lead author of the study, which was published in Cornell Universitys preprint server arXiv. By training a machine learning classifier to do this task, and by looking at the performance of that classifier, we can then assess the difference between different LLMs. Sun and his colleagues developed a machine learning model that analyzed the outputs of five popular LLMs, and was able to distinguish between them with 97.1% accuracy. Their machine learning model uncovered distinct verbal quirks unique to each LLM. ChatGPTs GPT-4o model, for instance, tends to use utilize more than other models. DeepSeek is partial to saying certainly. Googles Gemini often prefaces its conclusions with the word essentially, while Anthropics Claude overuses phrases like according to and according to the text when citing its sources. xAIs Grok stands out as more discursive and didactic, often reminding users to remember key points while guiding them through arguments with not only and but also. The writing, the word choices, the formatting are all different, says Yida Yin, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and a coauthor of the paper. These insights can help users select the best model for specific writing tasksor aid those trying to catch AI-generated text masquerading as human work. So, remember: according to this study, if a model utilizes certain words, its certainly possible to identify it.
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E-Commerce
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