Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for November 28, 2023

Gus is a land baron???

Many of us here remember when they were just starting but that seems like a big jump in Gus’s thoughts.

Perhaps there will be an unveiling tomorrow.

Their real estate helps in their expansion. Don’t lease the property own it. You can always rebuild and lease it out.

Father of a coworker was head of real estate for Kmart in their heyday. He made several very valuable property purchases for them.

Both my brothers met their wives working for Kmart. One brother and SIL were able to get 25+ year careers out of Kmart.

A quarter of my family exists and was able to build nice lives for themselves based on opportunities that happened because of the foresight my friend’s father made a decade or two before any of us were born.

Living by the beach is a lifestyle, not a job opportunity!

McDonald’s owns lotsa real estate, but their cows get smaller and smaller

McDonald’s is in the real estate business, not restaurant. They own the land and their franchises have to pay them.

We went to Disneyland and visit friends in California 30 years ago. These friends had talked often about their house having a view of the ocean. When we got there, he took me to the upstairs balcony and pointed west to a thin sliver of blue almost totally obscured by other houses and palm trees. That little slice of blue was the ocean about 1/2 mile away. He told me that because of that glimpse, they could legally advertise their home as ocean view property should they decide to sell it.

Such a thing made absolutely no sense to me. Seeing California once was enough. We never returned.

Gus, you sly devil. You probably own the building with the condo.

McDonalds is also the largest toy distributor in the world. Think about it.

One of our favorite places was the Sun Ray on Pensacola Beach built just after WWII. Opal took it out.

Why do I seem to think Gus sounds exactly like George Burns?

I think we’re about to find out that Gus is loaded.

Where ya going with this, Gus?

McDonald’s is a huge real estate company and an excellent franchisor. In the USA, if you visit a McDonalds you see no differences between CA and FL and MN for whether it is owner operated or a franchisee. They build the restaurant, provide the equipment, lease all to franchisee and then provide a very standardized method of doing EVERYTHING.

BlockBuster was very bad, remember how you couldn’t return a DVD picked up in another store? They wanted to share the advertising and brand name but each franchise had their own inventory and no method for distributing the returns back to the owner.

Nice artwork/coloring depicting a semi-rusted tin roof in panel 2.

Could be…

I wonder if that’s true, or even close.

Sonuvagun, I guess it is true. See wallstreetsurvivorDOTcomSLASHmcdonalds-beyond-the-burger

Don’t doubt it for a second Gus.

In this age of rentier capitalism, even corporations that still supposedly make things actually get most of their profit via rent extraction — as landlords, financiers, or intellectual property holders — rather than on providing goods and services. Fast food chains’ real estate holding companies make a killing renting locations to franchisees. GM’s biggest money-maker is General Motors Acceptance Corporation — the auto finance arm — not making cars. And that’s before private equity gets around to buying them up, loading them with debt and asset-stripping them.

Navy Pops!! YAY!!