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You hear the blurps and bloops after you pass the food court in the Mall of Georgia on a fall Sunday afternoon, the unmistakable sound of points being scored and players eliminated. Then you see him: Standing in an oversize vitrine is a 6-foot-tall animatronic rodent. Hes grinning and waving, but frozen in place, preserved like a museum piece. This isnt an outpost of Chuck E. Cheese, the 48-year-old family pizza chain with more than 460 restaurants in 45 states and another 88 abroad. Its Chucks Arcade, a fledgling new enterprise launched this past summer by parent company CEC Entertainment in an effort to expand the brands reach to Gen Xers, nostalgic millennials, and teens who have outgrown the flagship. These 13-and-counting old-school arcades are crammed with a dizzying mix of optionselaborate games like Drakons Realm Keepers (flying dragon battles); games tied to Marvel and Jurassic Park and the NBA; arcade classics like Tempest; and analog options like Skee-Ball and air hockey. This one, in Buford, Georgia, draws a steady afternoon crowd of couples, families, and packs of teenagers. A pair of giggly tweens take a furtive selfie with the animatronic Chuck near the door. Five years after the pandemic plunged Chuck E. Cheese into its second bankruptcy, the brand is showing surprising energy. In addition to launching the new arcades in exurbs and mid-tier cities around the country, it has redesigned most of its restaurants in the U.S. and expanded its menu; most recently, it announced another spin-off focused on physical active play. And its financial picture appears to be stabilizing. While the company reportedly struggled earlier this year to raise funds to meet debt payments, in September it closed a $625 million private credit term loan, and ratings agency S&P Global forecast that the companys 2025 same-store restaurant sales will grow between 2% and 2.5%. CEO David McKillips is not shy about his view of the brands potential. Since he took the helm, in 2020, the company has begun to leverage the intellectual property around Chuck E. Cheese, the character, inking several dozen licensing deals that have put the friendly rodents likeness on apparel, toys, frozen pizza, and more. A Chuck E. Cheese Christmasan animated holiday special featuring not just Chuck but also his sidekick charactersdebuted on Amazon Prime on Thanksgiving Day. All of this may seem like a long-shot vision for a brand thats been more associated recently with cheap punch lines (California governor Gavin Newsom told Vice President JD Vance on social media that ONLY SOMEONE WITH A LAW DEGREE FROM CHUCK E. CHEESE COULD BE AS DUMB AS YOU!!!) and squalid Florida Man cringe (last July, a video of an employee being arrested on fraud charges while wearing his Chuck E. costume went viral). But the CEC executives spin it differently. Its impactful when Chuck E. Cheese is in the news, good or bad, says Mark Kupferman, the companys chief insights and marketing officer. Chuck E. Cheeses Q scores are amazing. Shawn and Shelbie Moseley, a couple in their thirties who are making their second visit to Chucks Arcade today, share a fondness for Chuckand the animatronics that used to be the chains signature. Shawn has enjoyed several YouTube documentaries about them. Nostalgia, he says with a knowing grin. Its a sentiment that CEC is banking on. The company estimates that around 24 million kids, across four generations, have celebrated a birthday at Chuck E. Cheese. My IP dream is a global movie release, McKillips says, citing Shrek, Sonic the Hedgehog, and the cross-generational appeal of a Pixar property as reference points. I wont stop until we have a movie. There are theme park opportunities, gaming opportunities. . . . Im not done until every 5-year-old is going to sleep in their Chuck E. Cheese pajamas and waking up and having Chuck E. Cheese cereal. Nostalgia is an exercise in selective memory. And people remember things differently: One fans classic is another fans kitsch. Few brand mascots embody this tension better than Charles Entertainment Cheese. Born as a giant cigar-smoking rat with a bowler, buck teeth, and a Jersey accent, as Benj Edwards reported in Fast Company in 2017, Chuck first appeared alongside his animatronic bandmates co-vocalist Helen Henny, guitarist Jasper T. Jowls, keyboard player Mr. Munch, and Pasqually on drumsat a pizza-and-entertainment restaurant that opened in San Jose in 1977. In those days, arcades seemed vaguely shadyhangouts for directionless teenagers. Chuck E. Cheese, as the chain came to be called, offered a family-friendly alternative with games, pizza, and music, geared to delight 2-to-12-year-olds. Yet the concept always had deeper undercurrents. It was developed and tirelessly championed by founder Nolan Bushnell, the eccentric, visionary tech entrepreneur who also cofounded Atari (and was Steve Jobs’s first boss). He had sought to evoke the mix of technology and carnivalesque ritual that he saw at the heart of collective human culture. And Chuck was a rat only by accident. Turns out Bushnell had always wanted to start a pizza parlor and had the name Coyote Pizza in mind. In the mid-1970s, not long after cofounding Atari, Bushnell ordered what he thought was a coyote costumebut it turned out to be a rat costume. Trotted out as a regular gag at Atari company events, the character became known alternately as Rick Rat and Big Cheese. Bushnell floated the idea of calling his restaurant Rick Rats Pizza, but his marketing folks intervened, coming up with an alternative: Chuck E. Cheese. The first restaurant had a sign out front reading “Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre,” and by the mid-1980s, it had become a chain, with more than 240 locations. Hampered by overexpansion and a slew of copycats, the company went into its first bankruptcy in 1984. Bushnell resigned, and ShowBiz Pizza, a rival, bought the company in 1985, returning it to a suburban fixture again throughout the 1990s and 2000s. By the time Apollo Global Management bought the 577-location chain for $1.3 billion in 2014, Chuck had morphed into a cheerful adolescent, and, in the iPhone age, the animatronics were feeling antiquated. McKillips, formerly a Six Flags executive, paid his first visit to a Chuck E. Cheese on a Saturday in Grapevine, Texas, in 2019, and says he found the brand environment tired and dated. But just as he was about to leave, there was a verbal countdown to the arrival of Chuck himself. It was like a Taylor Swift concert, he recalls. Kids were going bananas. And I was like, This is fricking awesome. He left a 13-plus-year career at Six Flags to become CE in January 2020just as COVID-19 hit. Unexpectedly presiding over the chains second bankruptcy (filed in the summer of 2020 as diners stayed home), McKillips and his board raised $650 million in bonds, and ultimately spent $350 million to revamp its locations. COVID was a little bit of a blessing in disguise, he says. The brand was crushed for a time, and obviously the human toll on laid-off workers was severe. But it allowed us to pause and really look at the business. Theres a choice that youth-focused brands grapple with: Do we grow up with our audienceor stay forever young? Chuck E. Cheese had always been in the forever-young business, but had, McKillips felt, lost touch with todays kids. Winking satires in Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia (the Risk E. Rats Pizza and Amusement Center) and the horror movie Five Nights at Freddys didnt help. Out went Munchs Make Believe Band, as Chuck E.s animatronic musical group was called. In came an interactive dance floor, with a jumbotron and Kidz Bop as an official music partner. Arcade games stayed, but the interiors got brighter and featured adventure zone areas with trampolines and superhero playgrounds. And the pizza got better. During COVID-19, the company converted its kitchens into ghost kitchens for its new delivery and takeout brand, Pasquallys Pizza & Wings. In the process, the company reformulated its pizza recipe and expanded its menu with more toppings and options than it had ever bothered with before, an experiment that resulted in a new adult menu when its dining rooms reopened and the ghost kitchen brand was retired in the spring of 2025. The business model changed too. Borrowing a tactic from the amusement park industry, the chain started to offer a variety of seasonal and annual passessuch as a $49 Summer Fun pass for unlimited visits for eight weeksproviding discounts in a belt-tightening era, guaranteeing steadier revenue, and cementing loyalty. Chuck E. Cheese sold 79,000 passes in 2023. The next year, it sold nearly 400,000. Since the beginning, Chuck E. Cheese has been, on some level, a tech company. Today, its main restaurant chain is the largest arcade in the world and the biggest buyer of games, McKillips says. We have 2 billion gameplays every single year. The company opened a handful of arcades in malls in 2024, called the Fun Spot Arcade, which flopped. But Kupferman, the companys chief insights and marketing officer (and another Six Flags veteran), began envisioning a new stand-alone arcade business that could carry Chuck E. Cheese branding. McKillips was resistant. Doesnt fit, he recalls thinking. We are about age 2 to 12, wholesome, safe family entertainment. They ended up leaving the modern version of the mouse with the childrens pizza chain but using traditional Chuck E., the retro version associated with the 1980s and 1990s, for the arcade. When the first Chucks Arcade launched in 2025, its logo featured the nostalgic version of Chuck, with the bowler hat and bow tie, and a salvaged animatronic rodent greeted people at the door. While the company wont share specific data, a spokesperson says the switch to Chucks Arcade from Fun Spot has had a very positive effect on the performance of each location. A typical visitor, whether a teen or a 50-year-old, buys a $50 game card and exhausts it over an hour or so. Now the company is making another play for its millennial and Gen Z fans, this time alongside their Gen Alpha kids, with Chuck E. Cheese Adventure World. The first location11,300 square feet, or 10 times the typical size of an active play zone in one of its restaurantsjust opened in Arlington, Texas, in November. Features include slides and tunnels, climbing zones, a dance floor, and exclusive character appearances (as well as snacks, but curiously, no pizza). The company says it will test a handful of locations before setting any full rollout goals. As for the flagship chain, the company is currently leveraging all those new screens for its CEC Media Network, announced in Maya de facto television network utilizing almost 4,000 screens across hundreds of Chuck E. Cheese locations. Appealing to todays screen-focused kids, this in-restaurant network plays selections from a library of original entertainment content, with more than 300 digital shorts featuring Chuck E. and the band, as well as partner content from Kidz Bop and others. We are using that as a promotional platform, selling advertising, creating a new revenue model, McKillips says. Its seen by 40 million visitors a year. The company is also working with streaming technology provider Future Today to expand the CEC Media Network beyond the restaurants. CEC-branded channels now exist on other platforms, such as Roku, Fire TV, Samsung, LG, and Future Todays own family-friendly platform, HappyKids. But for some, watching a screen isnt as entertaining as interacting with it, and thats what Chucks Arcade is for. Back at the Mall of Georgia, a young boy and his mom play a seated, two-player virtual reality game that involves fighting a frantic array of monsters, including Godzilla, from an armed helicopter. The kid is ecstatic, blasting away at monsters and feeling the effects supplied by the VR headset. Mommy, were flying so high! he squawks, but Mom doesnt answer. Shes blasting away, too, lost in the game.
Category:
E-Commerce
We all think that we have great ideas. And we all tend to fall in love with our own ideas because, well, theyre ours. But most of my ideasand yoursare probably mediocre. And no, thats not an insult; its just a fact about the way most ideas are generated. I mean, if we were all genuinely spewing game-changers the world would be in a much different place than it is today. Most ideas are created without much thought or insight or pushbackand could probably benefit from people challenging them a lot more. Way too many ideas get approved that shouldnt have made it out of the conference room, but with lack of time, energy, and questioning, they move forward at an alarming rate. It doesnt have to be this way. Imagine if you had someone whose job it was to voice concerns about those ideas; someone whose sole purpose was to poke holes, identify flaws, and challenge assumptions. A Devils Advocate isnt there to be negative just for the sake of it. The role exists to make your ideas sharper and more bulletproof before they ever get the green light. The purpose isnt to tear down or be difficult; its to help you move forward more confidently with the best version of your idea, an idea that has been stress-tested and refined to withstand real-world challenges. A stress test The reason you need a Devils Advocate is simple: its the only way to make sure your ideas are ready for the real world. It should be common practice to stress-test your assumptions, invite dissent, and build real critical thinking into your process. Constructive debate is a cornerstone of the innovation process and should be embraced. Personally, I love it. Heres why: it makes me, and my ideas, better. The Devils Advocate role creates honest discussion, and pushes people to elevate their work by considering: Is this really the best we can do? They encourage people to say the hard thing: what others may be too afraid to express. Id much rather have someone help me think through all the potential angles early so I can win versus being blindsided later. I tell my team when Im introducing an idea: Please argue with meI need your brain on this! I dont have all the knowledge or ideas, so I dont make a decision until weve done that, says Tracie Ybarra, VP of talent at Avantor. Without someone willing to push back, your ideas may never reach their full potential. Instead, theyll simply be okay ideas, good enough to get by, but not strong enough to disrupt, innovate, or leave a lasting impact. And thats a shame. Because were all here to live a life of meaning, not mediocrity. Make Your Ideas Stronger How does being a Devils Advocate actually work? The goal isnt to be contrarian or difficult just for the fun of it. Its about creating a process that welcomes balanceseeing the potential and the problems in an idea, and generating solutions to overcome issues that arise. When you know that someone will challenge your ideas, you work harder to defend them, to improve them, to find the flaws before anyone else does. A good Devils Advocate is a professional skeptic: They don’t just point out what’s wrong; they ask why its wrong, and they offer alternative solutions. Engaging with you like this forces you to reflect, to rethink, and revise with the goal of improvement, not failure. Jarret Kleppél, VP, talent and organizational development at NBCUniversal, agrees: Inviting critique and cynicism throughout our process keeps our team less emotionally attached to the proposal and more focused on the outcome. This process also builds an important skill: resilience. You cant prepare for every problem in advance, but you can certainly stress-test better things before you go live. The Power of Constructive Conflict Constructive conflict is what makes a successful team. But we often take conflict as a negative thing. I like to think of constructive conflict to be more like a contrastit creates productive friction by giving a different perspective, not a divisive one. Without that, we settle into mediocrity, where comfort ensures everyones happy, but nobody really grows. Real innovation happens when different perspectives collide, when people arent afraid to challenge each others ideas in a productive way. A MIT Sloan-affiliated piece emphasizes that having a critical reviewer in meetings improves outcomes. One company that they studied experienced a 25% improvement in their project success rates when this role was active. What does that mean? It means that the Devils Advocate creates a stronger foundation for your ideas by challenging them before they face the real world. Devils Advocates also eliminate some of the fatal flaws of some collaboration: groupthink and the tendency to favor consensus over critical thought. People are scared of scrutiny so we avoid it, and thats how “good enough” takes hold. A Devils Advocate Doesnt Kill Ideas. It Protects Them A good idea that hasnt been tested isnt goodits vulnerable. Its like sending a fighter into the ring without any practice or training, expecting them to win. Doing that is naive, and somebody just might get hurt. The Devils Advocate is the trainer that makes your idea go a few rounds in the gym before its ready to compete. At X, Googles innovation lab, teams designate employees to act as devils advocates, identifying flaws in ideas to make them better before launch. IBM thoroughly tests ideas for weaknesses during high-stakes project planning to dramatically increase its chances of success. Christine Tricoli, group executive vice president and chief human resources officer at H.W. Kaufman Group advocates for this approach: One of the benefits of having someone ‘call you out’ or share the ‘unspoken concerns’ of the group is that it spares the team the embarrassment of having someone external discovering the issue for you. It saves time and money and helps you be more productive sooner rather than later. Leaders need to cultivate an environment that encourages this type of disruption or challenge within the team. How Do You Implement the Devils Advocate? Its easier than it sounds. Start by assigning someone the role of asking (or rotating the role among the team) tough questions during brainstorms or project planning. This person should have the power to challenge assumptions, ask what could go wrong, and offer alternative solutions without repercussions. Their job isnt to just criticize; its to actively work with the team to solve problems and refine ideas so theyre more likely to succeed. Ask yourself: when was the last time you let someone challenge your ideas in a constructive way? And if you dont have a Devils Advocate on your team, how could you benefit from having one? Let Dissent Be Your Friend My closest friends are the ones that can be most honest with me. I need them because they make me a better person, and their intent is to help, not to harm. Its the same here with ideas. By challenging your ideas early and often,you help move them forward and give them the best shot at success. Stop avoiding the hard questions, and stop letting groupthink win. Instead, build the Devils Advocate into your process and let it turn your good ideas into great ones. Because in the end, the only thing worse than a bad idea is an unexamined one.
Category:
E-Commerce
Hi there! My name is Marcus Collins, DBA, and I study culture and its influence and impact on human behavior at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Each week, this column will explore the inner workings of organizational culture and the mechanisms that make it tick. Every entry will be accompanied by an episode from my podcast, From the Culture, that digs deeper into the culture of work from my conversations with the organizational leaders that make it all happen. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then this is the most important conversation in business that you are not having. Sign up for the newsletter to make sure you dont miss a beat. ___________________________________ Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Weve all heard this misattributed Peter Drucker quote and instinctively understand the disproportionate influence culture can have on an organizations business. However, if you asked five people to define organizational culture, youd likely get 55 different answers. Chief among them would be something along the lines of organizational culture is how we do things around here, the behaviors and norms that make up how a company engages in the collective production of work. Sounds about right, right? Sure. However, a centurys worth of literature on the matter would say otherwise. A social operating system According to Émile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology, culture is a system of conventions and expectations that demarcate who we are and govern what people like us do. Its a social operating system by which we collectively see the world and, subsequently, behave in it . . . together. What we wear, how we talk, what we dotheyre all byproducts of our cultural subscription. The same goes for organizational culture, the shared operating system for an organization that helps employees collectively see, so that they might collectively do. Therefore, reducing our concept of organizational culture to merely what we do around here ignores half of what makes culture . . . well . . . culture. Its this half, the way the organization sees the world and makes meaning of it, that dictates what we do. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_16-9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_square_thumbnail.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"FROM THE CULTURE","dek":"","subhed":"FROM THE CULTURE is a podcast that explores the inner workings of organizational culture that enable companies to thrive, teams to win, and brands to succeed. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then this is the most important conversation in business that you arent having.","description":"","ctaText":"Listen","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLvojPSJ6Iy0T4VojdtGsZ8Q4eAJ6mzr2h","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91470870,"imageMobileId":91470866,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Take Airbnb, for example. The company sees the world as a place where everyone belongs, so its behaviors are demonstrative of this perspective. Thats why Airbnb adheres to a No Meetings Wednesday tradition to accommodate team members who tend to be more introverted, so everyone belongs. They practice radical acts of transparency so that information is available to everyone, not just those in the know. They also provide employees with an annual $2K travel credit to encourage people to go out and experience the world the way other people do. For everyone at Airbnb to feel like they belong, its important that employees see themselves as a part of a global community, not just as coworkers. World travel helps this endeavor by fostering the kind of empathy that drives connection. These ways of doing things around here at Airbnb are byproducts of how the organization sees around here. Together, the seeing and the doing constitute the organizations culture. Culture isnt just values Of course, there are those of us who understand this distinction. However, far too often we mistake the organizations perspective for its values; but the two are not analogues. Values are what an organization deems to be important. The way the organization sees the world, on the other hand, defines the truths that the organization holds about the world and why certain things have any importance in the first place. For instance, Patagonia believes in “climbing clean.” The company envisions a world with minimal human invasiveness on the planet and, therefore, it values environmentalism and integrity, which, ultimately, inform its ways of working. Its valueswhich the organization deems importantare informed by its perspective. Values alone are hollow without the deeply held truths of the organizations perspective that undergirds them. Its no wonder that research from the MIT Sloan Management Reviews 2020 Glassdoor Culture 500 study found no correlation between a companys stated values and the lived experiences of its employees. Culture is not a companys values; its the system upon which these values are constructed. So, without a clear perspective of the world, an organizations values are typically meaningless and have no impact on its behaviors. Theyre merely pretty words beautifully stated but rarely integrated. This is a significant challenge for business leaders who have reduced organizational culture to a set of rituals, rules, and words. Culture is so much more than these components, but since so many of us have defined culture so narrowly, we have not yet fully realized its impact. Culture, as Durkheim asserts, is an operating system, and this system is the most influential external force on human behavior that we arent fully leveraging. Not because of a lack of skill, intelligence, or technology, but because of a lack of understanding. Thats why this column existsto examine the whys and hows of organizational culture so that we might get better at it. Its also why I created a podcastin a world where there are probably too many podcasts, quite frankly. Culture is an organizations biggest cheat code, but the only way to use it properly is to understand it deeply. So thats what were here to do . . . together. And this is our first unlock, with many more to follow. If we want to get better at the way we do organizational culture, it starts with getting better at the way we see it. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_16-9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_square_thumbnail.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"FROM THE CULTURE","dek":"","subhed":"FROM THE CULTURE is a podcast that explores th inner workings of organizational culture that enable companies to thrive, teams to win, and brands to succeed. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then this is the most important conversation in business that you arent having.","description":"","ctaText":"Listen","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLvojPSJ6Iy0T4VojdtGsZ8Q4eAJ6mzr2h","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91470870,"imageMobileId":91470866,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
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