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Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday?
Posted By katie allison granju
Randy Neal talks about the precarious fortunes of one of East Tennessee’s best-known businesses:
It’s always sad when a good company goes public and has to focus on “reposition investments and expenditures” and “reduce debt levels” using “excess cash flow” and “strengthen their financial position” adn a strategy of “returning excess capitol to shareholders” instead of just making a good product, food in this case, and providing good service to their customers.
Have you eaten at a Ruby Tuesday since the big remodeling/menu makeover? What did you think?
Mar 6th, 2008
I was at UT in the 70’s when Sandy Beall opened Ruby Tuesday on the strip. For the time, Ruby Tuesday seemed to be a fairly simple operation, but it also seemed to represent quality and gave the customers an interesting experience. However, Mr. Beall was apparently more interested in becoming a huge corporation than in being a small operator that offered real quality. The company grew and grew, and with it came the complexity of a large company. One had only to dine in one of the restaurants to see that the growth would eventually lead to a clumsy, awkward company that relied on complexity to survive. The employees had been so over-trained that it was uncomfortable. One could see the wheels turning when a customer asked even the simplest of questions. The company wasn’t human any more — it was an automaton that pretended to be friendly, but could never escape the fact that it was a machine. The company over-researched and over-analyzed everything in the belief that the answer lay in data. The fact was all they had to do to be successful was give the customers a quality PERSONAL experience and not treat them like a number. Their last mistake was in believing the answer lay in decor. While it is true that the old kitchy souvenir decor was dated, that wasn’t the problem. The problem is that the restaurants have no LIFE and haven’t had for a long, long time.