Somebody needs to send Ariadne's Gary Weiss an industrial quantity of Quick'eze, stat!
The corporate raider– who, in our humble opinion has the best hairdo of any activist shareholder we know, even if it does veer dangerously close to Krusty The Clown territory – has been busily plotting the downfall of Simon "The Humble" Kelly's board at the embattled Dreamworld operator, Ardent Leisure, and that means getting up close and personal with the company's assets.
During the past week, Weiss has been a regular at several of Ardent Leisure's Main Event properties in the US. A terrifying cross between a ten-pin alley and a Chuck E Cheese pizza joint. A place where, it has to be said, good taste goes to die.
To wit: the current US summer offer of all you can "bowl, eat and play for $12.95!" Let them eat cake, we suppose.
Taking a leaf out of the playbook of his buddy Solomon Lew – with whom he has worked on Premier Investments business around the world and who likes nothing more than popping into a shopping mall and personally perusing sites for new Smiggles, thus furthering his plans to take over the world one garish pencil case at a time – Weiss has been performing due diligence on the centres by visiting them, partaking of their wares and assessing whether there's unrealised value to be extracted (which he seems to think there is).
That sounds like a whole lot of cheap pizza to us. Our stomachs are churning in sympathy Gazza.
Meanwhile, the Ariadne tilt continues to gather pace with Weiss telling anyone who will listen that one of their board nominees, Brad Richmond, comes highly qualified as the former CFO of listed American cheap-eats giant Darden Restaurants (think Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse and the fabulously evocatively named Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen (excuse us while we vomit a bit in our mouths).
What that man doesn't know about an all-you-can-eat salad bar and maximising profits by recycling the chip fat quite simply isn't worth knowing.
