Ed Sparks

[Ed Sparks @RoadbedEd]

@praisebepete @cammillerfilms Per Google "Ohio owns almost none of the Ohio River because its southern border was legally set at the northern low-water mark of the river as it existed in 1792, leaving the entire water channel to Virginia (and later Kentucky and West Virginia)."

[Ed Sparks @RoadbedEd]

That is the way to start the second half of the season @Reds #ATOBTTR

[CSX @CSX]

The CSX Howard Street Tunnel Project is one of @RTSMag’s Top Projects for 2026. We cleared the last segment of our network for double-stack intermodal service ahead of schedule & set the stage for long-term growth. Thank you to our CSX team & partners. Learn more: https://t.co/qbH7OwLeav

[Atlantic Sun Conference @ASUNSports]

A historic season🏆

#ASUNMLAX x @JAX_MLAX x @JAX_Dolphins

[Goodyear Blimp @GoodyearBlimp]

here for the horsepower

[Kentucky Derby @KentuckyDerby]

Good morning from Churchill Downs.

Today’s the day 🌹

[Cam Miller 🎥 @cammillerfilms]

It's a rain delay at the old ball orchard. You know what time it is....#Reds

[Ed Sparks @RoadbedEd]

@StHenrySports

#LetsGoCRU #wlax

[St. Henry Athletics @StHenrySports]

🥍 It’s Gameday‼️ The Crusaders are back home after a spring Break, hosting the Edgewood Cougars at the Gumz Family Tack & Field. First Face-Off at 6PM. Let’s Go CRU‼️

🆚 Edgewood (OH) Cougars
📍 at SHDHS
🏟️ Gumz Family Track & Firld
⏰ 6PM

#LetsGoCRU

[St. Henry Athletics @StHenrySports]

🥍 It’s Gameday‼️ The Crusaders bead to Georgetown to face off with the Great Crossing WarHawks! First Face-Off at 7PM. Let’s Go CRU‼️

🆚 Great Crossing WarHawks
📍 at Great Crossing
⏰ 7PM

#LetsGoCRU

[Cam Miller 🎥 @cammillerfilms]

We need more of the old school mascot/player/mgr hijinks.

[Ed Sparks @RoadbedEd]

A beautiful day for racing @keeneland

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

‘SPACEBALLS 2’ will release on April 23, 2027 in theaters.

Starring Rick Moranis, Bill Pullman, Lewis Pullman, Daphne Zuniga, George Wyner, Mel Brooks, Josh Gad, Keke Palmer and Anthony Carrigan.

[St. Henry Athletics @StHenrySports]

Goals for the CRU:

Ella Gunning - 1
Elizabeth Egan - 1
Addison Mann - 2
Mackenzie Erpenbeck - 1
Kendra Selm - 2
Ashley Selm - 3

[Ed Sparks @RoadbedEd]

Excellent @MammothWVH show tonight in @CityofJax at the 5!

[introvert @introvertsmemes]

True

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Red Robin is a case study in how to kill a restaurant chain from the inside out.

In 2015, the stock hit $92.90 per share. Revenue peaked in 2017 at $1.4 billion across 573 locations. Families loved the place. Bottomless fries. Birthday parties. “Gourmet” burgers when that word still meant something in casual dining. The brand had real equity.

Then management panicked about rising minimum wages and made the single worst decision in the company’s history: they fired all the bussers.

January 2018. CEO Steve Carley cut bussers across every location, eliminated expeditors, and replaced kitchen managers with generic “back-of-house” roles. The logic was pure spreadsheet thinking. Labor costs were rising, so remove labor. The savings looked great in quarterly earnings. The second and third order effects were catastrophic.

Tables stopped getting cleared. Wait times ballooned. Walkaways increased 85% year over year. 75% of the dine-in traffic loss came during peak hours, the exact window when the restaurant makes money. Ticket times out of the kitchen jumped a full minute on average. Customers who waited 20 minutes for a table and another 20 for a burger stopped coming back. Red Robin’s own CEO at the time, Denny Marie Post, admitted the damage was self-inflicted.

And here’s the compounding problem. While Red Robin was gutting its own service model, it simultaneously launched a “Tavern Double” value menu at $6.99 to drive traffic. Orders of the cheap burgers jumped from 9% to 15% of all orders, which cratered the average check. So Red Robin was now serving worse food, slower, in a dirtier restaurant, at a lower price point. That combination is how you enter a death spiral.

Meanwhile, 16% of locations were in malls. Mall traffic was already declining. Those locations saw 5.5% sales drops versus 3% at standalone stores, dragging the whole system down. Management acknowledged the problem quarter after quarter and did nothing about it for years.

Five CEOs in 10 years. Think about that. The one leader who provided stability, Michael Snyder, was with the chain from 1979 to 2005. After that, it was a revolving door. Every new CEO launched a new turnaround plan. Every plan was abandoned by the next CEO. The North Star plan. The First Choice plan. New menu rollouts. Loyalty program reboots. None of it addressed the core issue: they’d trained an entire generation of customers to think of Red Robin as the place where the service is terrible.

The contrast with Chili’s makes the failure even clearer. Kevin Hochman took over Chili’s in 2022 and did the opposite of what Red Robin did. He simplified the menu, invested in operations, launched a $10.99 “3 for Me” deal that went viral on TikTok, and let the food speak for itself. Chili’s just posted 31% same-store sales growth. Red Robin’s comparable revenue was down 1.2% for all of 2024.

Both chains were in roughly the same position three years ago. One chain invested in the customer experience. The other spent a decade cutting it. Red Robin’s $65M market cap and Chili’s $3.3B market cap tell you which approach works.

The stock went from $92 to $3.61. That’s what happens when you optimize for the quarterly earnings call instead of the customer walking through the door.

[The Real Mike Rowe @mikeroweworks]

https://t.co/D959tRvHFU

If I Ruled the World, I would instruct the presidents of every media outlet to air this video in prime time. I would instruct every professor in every university to show it in every class. And then, I would freeze every social media account, until the owners of said accounts watched this seven minute public service announcement in its entirety. However, because I don't rule the world, and because I don't really harbor authoritarian tendencies, (I think,) I can only share the wisdom of Mr. Hudson on my personal page and encourage you to do the same. And invite him onto my podcast, at his convenience.

[exQUIZitely 🕹️ @exQUIZitely]

Some of you will be old enough to remember this. Defragging - and it actually did serve a purpose. It was essential for optimizing slow, mechanical hard drives by rearranging scattered data into contiguous blocks. By doing so increased data load times (since the physical head of the hard drive didn't have to move that much).

However, what I remember most was the almost hypnotical satisfaction of seeing all those little blocks flashing, being organized, and just "knowing" that it was good for my computer.

In times when you fiddled around with autoxec.bat and config.sys, when every little Kilobyte of RAM mattered, and when hard drives were measured in Megabytes, not Terrabytes, the weekly routine of defragging almost felt like cleaning up your room.

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

Today is National Thesaurus Day.

Personally, we find these made-up holidays contemptible, abhorrent, nauseating, repugnant, and unpalatable.