Father. Bloomberg Intelligence Restaurant Analyst/Stock Guru. Hoya. Proudly blocked by @kocherlakota009. RTs are not endorsements & all opinions are my own.
New Jersey, USA
Joined December 2010
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Chipotle after reporting 0.5% SSS
(even though 2yr SSS dropped 270bps and adjusted net income fell 20%)
@HedgeyeFood $CMG
Mike Halen retweeted
Highly recommend taking four minutes of your day and listening to this speech by Ernie Johnson
Mike Halen retweeted
Players don’t quit teams.
They quit transactional coaches.
Saban breaks down why. 🎥
Mike Halen retweeted
Cooper Kupp's mindset is a blueprint for the inner game of performance.
“From Monday through Saturday, I do everything I can to be the best version of myself…Once I step on the field, it doesn’t matter. The results don’t matter. I get to play from victory, not for victory.”
You can’t play free until you’ve done the work.
Preparation builds confidence. Detachment unlocks freedom.
When you combine the two, you perform from a place of peace, not pressure.
📹: The Pivot Podcast
Mike Halen retweeted
Tom Brady says his career turned around when a sports psychologist told him to stop complaining about what he wasn’t getting and start stewarding what he had the right way
“Greg said to me, ‘Why don’t you quit bitching about all the things you’re not getting, and how about you do the best with whatever opportunities you get?’, ‘Stop worrying about what the other quarterback’s getting. Stop worrying about what the coach is saying to you.’”
“‘Every time you get in there, you bring the juice. You bring the energy. You bring the enthusiasm. You treat practice like a game.’ Because if you just decide to go out there and you’re blaming everybody else, where does that get you? So I started to change my attitude.”
“I didn’t have a lot of confidence in myself. And when you don’t have a lot of confidence in yourself, you blame other people. When you gain confidence in yourself, you start pointing the finger at yourself.”
“I would encourage every athlete to look in the mirror after every day of practice or a game and say, ‘What can I do better to help the team? What can I do better?’”
“Not, ‘What does the coach need to do better?’ Not, ‘What do my teammates need to do better?’, ‘What do I need to do better?’ If every player does that, you’re going to have an incredible team.”
“You can’t have a false confidence. You don’t only gain your confidence because of your physical ability. You gain your confidence because you’re prepared, because you’re competitive. I couldn’t just show up and be better than everybody.”
“I had to show up prepared. I had to show up with energy. I had to show up with my body feeling right. I had to show up like I was on a mission.”
Mike Halen retweeted
🚨 TARGET EMPLOYEE EXPOSES HOW THE SHOPPING BASKETS ARE TRACKING YOU — AND WALMART’S CART IS EVEN WORSE
A Target employee went on camera and told shoppers to look closely at the baskets.
That plastic handle is not just a handle.
He said there’s a tracker in it now, built to follow you through the store and log how you shop.
Consumer habits.
Every aisle.
Every pause.
Every turn.
Walmart already patented a cart that goes further. Sensors to track how fast you push it, your heart rate, your body temperature, then dump that data into a server.
Not a meme.
A patent.
So Target is watching where you walk.
Walmart wants to watch what your body does while you walk.
Would you still grab a store basket after this… or is grocery shopping officially part of the surveillance grid?
Nah PE screwed it up. Their decision to buy out franchisees and shift to a Foodservice model, then try to get a fatter multiple in the market was absolutely, positively moronic. We lambasted them in our pre IP0 note.
It's a wee bit more complicated than this.
First, Krispy Kreme built enormous, doughnut palaces with big displays of doughnut-making gloriousness. But ... consumers just don't eat enough doughnuts to make it work. KKD doesn't sell enough coffee to make it work, and the palaces aren't convenient enough, anyway.
So the solution has always been to use those palaces as manufacturing plants to supply a bunch of retailers, etc., with a steady supply of doughnuts. And so in theory, the company would improve the unit economics on the palaces while improving overall "doughnut access."
In more recent years KKD became a logistics company rather than a simple doughnut chain. But it wasn't a particularly good logistics company, as evidenced by the experience of some McDonald's operators who received frozen product in the winter.
The company's McDonald's promotion was a brutal failure, triggering another shift to focus on fewer, more profitable locations outside of said palaces to sell doughnuts. So they're focused more on the Targets, Walmarts and Costcos of the world.
Will it work? Who knows. Chain doughnuts are difficult, regardless of the owner. Dunkin' shifted to coffee and other beverages. But the economics of doughnuts is just really difficult, especially if you're going to be a publicly traded chain.
Mike Halen retweeted
Have to do it in person:
Double QPC
No ketchup/ mustard
Add Big Mac sauce
Extra onions
My fav hack!
Mike Halen retweeted
Watch the most feared bettor in Vegas put $2 million at risk every Sunday - through people who use fake names so no bookmaker can trace a bet back to him.
An hour before kickoff, Billy Walters sits at a wall of phones and screens, running his book like a quant fund. He never places a bet himself. His partners sit inside the sports books under code names, jbird and Wolfman, and fire his orders the second he calls.
His analysts are mathematicians who have worked for him 30 years and never met each other. They model weather, injuries, line moves - everything. Only Walters sees the full board.
He isn't picking teams on a hunch. He's pricing games better than the bookmakers and betting when the math says the line is wrong. Any book that realizes he's behind a bet stops taking it. So he stays invisible.
30 years. Never a losing year. A gambler who runs on numbers, not luck.
Mike Halen retweeted
One of the pieces of spinach in my @cava bowl today became fully sentient out of nowhere and starting WALKING
Need lawyer recs ASAP and am demanding free cava for life at MINIMUM
Mike Halen retweeted
New, from me: Subway is making it harder for franchisees to close stores, requiring them to seek committee approval while suggesting they would owe future royalties if they close money-losing stores before their FA agreements are up.
Also, the company is requiring them to expand hours, accept all third-party delivery providers and keep them available 98% of the time as it prepares a late-night hours push.
All this comes as the chain has closed more than 8,000 U.S. locations since 2015. And its new owner Roark Capital has a lot of incentive to keep stores open, as it has debt to pay from its 2024 acquisition of the chain. That's something Subway did not have before.
Also, this may be the weirdest damn response I've had from a company on a story. But whatever.
There are some other notable nuggets, including the fact that 30% of the chain's stores didn't accept a recent Moana promotion.
Anyway, more here:
restaurantbusinessonline.com…
Mike Halen retweeted
Warren Buffett jokes about Charlie Munger's Costco obsession
"Charlie and I were on a plane recently that was hijacked. The hijackers picked us out as the two dirty capitalists that they really had to execute"
"They were a little abashed about it, they didn't really have anything against us, so they said each of us would be given one request before they shot us. They turned to Charlie and said, what would you like as your request?"
"Charlie said, I would like to give once more my speech on the virtues of Costco, with illustrations. And the hijacker said, well, that sounds pretty reasonable to me"
"He turned to me and said, and what would you like, Mr. Buffett? And I said, shoot me first"
Bad news for the guest check average
Our @technomic data shows this very trend - more solo diners. While it’s a worrying trend socially, restaurants like Dominos may be able to take advantage thru menu innovation and portion size options.
Detroit style pizza without brick cheese/cheddar is blasphemy
Domino's newest menu item is fascinating. The "Domino" is a single-serve, Detroit-style pizza. The idea is that customers can order whatever toppings they want on their pizzas so they don't have to bargain with their friends or family members or whatever.
But it's also the kind of innovation we'll likely see in the pizza space more often. It targets a new occasion, specifically the solo diner. Or maybe it's an add-on item.
Now pizza chains have long tried this sort of thing. Pizza Hut's Personal Pan Pizza was highly popular when it was a dine-in chain. And the entire fast-casual pizza sector was built on the idea that customers wanted freedom from idiot friends who wanted pineapple on their pizzas or hated mushrooms or whatever. And chains have always explored new dayparts or occasions.
Yet there is a real need for this kind of product now. Pizza chains have to find ways to get new customers or new occasions or add-on orders because the business is bleeding share, thanks to the loss of delivery business to third-party players and weakness among lower-income consumers.
So many chains, including Domino's, have resorted to discounts to get traffic. That discount war is going to start causing some real problems for franchisees in this business if the brands can't find other ways to get customers to order. And so this type of innovation is probably necessary.
Will the Domino work? Absolutely no idea, but it looks good and Detroit-style pizza is the shit. (It's also growing in demand, unlike roughly everything else in that business.) But I would suspect we'll see more of this type of thing in the future.
Mike Halen retweeted
New Pod Alert! We talk with @mikehalen from @BBGIntelligence about the industry, markets, and wages. And we pass the bottle and talk some hemp beverages followed by, as always, the Legislative Scorecard.
open.spotify.com/episode/0WT…
Mike Halen retweeted
Roger Federer told Dartmouth's graduating class the number he thinks explains his whole career:
"In tennis, perfection is impossible. In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches."
Then he asked them to guess a second number:
"Now, I have a question for you. What percentage of points do you think I won in those matches? Only 54%. In other words, even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play."
What that does to you over a career:
"When you lose every second point on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot. You teach yourself to think, okay, I double-faulted, it's only a point. Okay, I came to the net, then I got passed again, it's only a point."
It applies to the good ones too:
"Even a great shot, an overhead back-end smash that ends up on ESPN's top-10 playlist. That, too, is just a point."
The part that matters is what he does with the point once it ends:
"When you're playing a point, it has to be the most important thing in the world, and it is. But when it's behind you, it's behind you. This mindset is really crucial, because it frees you to fully commit to the next point at the next point after that. With intensity, clarity, and focus."
And his definition of the best players alive:
"The best in the world are not the best because they win every point. It's because they know they lose again and again and have learned how to deal with it."
- Roger Federer (@rogerfederer) on Dartmouth Commencement (@dartmouth)
Refusing to carry the last point is the same skill as refusing to carry the day's open loops to bed. That one is the sixth fix in my new cortisol piece.
