In the past 7-Eleven was unique in the franchise world where you could make a comfortable living owning a single store and that was the major ownership model. McDonalds and other options at the time really depended on a multi-store ownership model. Corporate 7-Eleven (Southland Corp technically) moved away from this single store model in the mid to late 90's, instead preferring single, larger corporations in a region, owning 10+ stores over a single store owner. They made this happen over a 20 year span by changing the contracts franchisees sign and must to re-sign every x years. Every contract renewal drastically reduced the single store income and made it much harder for single store owners to make a living. Corporate also started preferring to give new stores to existing, large scale franchises over new store owners which changes the initial capital needed for a store by over 10x as with an existing store you will have to pay the rights from the previous franchisee instead of just the corporate.
My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles all own or have owned 7-Eleven stores and have since the 80's. I've worked there, been to their conferences, and still get to hear about them at all family gatherings :)
McDonalds was the same early on, but evolved into a real-estate operation that also sells hamburgers.
Last I knew (this was the 1990s) there were still a few single-store franchisees but most franchisees owned at least half a dozen stores in a market. I also think the investment required to buy a franchise is vastly larger than it was in the beginning. It's really only affordable to owners who can leverage the income they are making from the stores they already own.
AFAIK they do still require owners to be operators. You can't own a McDonalds franchise passively. But I'm not sure that's still the case.
Back in the 80's you still needed to have multiple stores. Otherwise your overhead from back office and maintenance stuff would just eat up too much profits. Once you hit three stores, you could start to make serious money if you ran a tight ship.
Not to be a contrarian but that vanilla look is what creates traction or commerce. When we pull into a 7-Eleven weather in Seattle or Florida people want the same experience and the same expectations. And as such with end with liminal space. A sad space where the coffee and the Slim-Jim are the same. The familiarity of nowhere or anywhere America.
Younger than that for me. As kids in elementary school my friends and I used to ride our bikes to the gas station at the entrance to our subdivision. They only had like one rack of candy bars and a soda vending machine, but for a 10 year old with some change in his pocket that was great.
This was the mid-1970s.
There was a larger "convenience store" at the other end of the next subdivision, you could bike to it but it was a few miles so we went there less often. They had a lot more snack choices though, and you could get a glimpse of the covers of the Playboy magazines that were on the shelf behind the counter.
I think part of the reason the US doesn't feel like the US anymore is that ownership of properties is no longer Bob who dreamed of some day opening a Pizza shop on Main st. It's all corporate now, all the way down.
Yup. Consolidation of the markets is ultimately what's destroyed small businesses. It's currently working on the likes of dentists and vets.
The US has devolved to the point where only someone with a large amount of wealth can start and run a business. You can't open up a small hardware shop anymore because no bank will give that loan and no supplier will give you the same wholesale prices they give to the likes of Home Depot or Lowes or heck even Walmart.
At every level in the supply distribution system we've seen consolidation and ultimately locking out of competition.
For example, here's why independent pharmacists have been going out of business [1]. We need new Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt anti-trust breakups to make capitalism work again. Capitalism can't work without a diverse competitive market.
I agree with your point, but there's a fundamental problem you need to consider. The problem is that the Mom & Pops are inefficient and the giants are efficient. Amazon exemplifies the consolidation problem you're talking about. But it has a favorability rating of 78%, ahead of the U.S. military, the police, and the CDC: https://harvardharrispoll.com/assets/uploads/2023/05/HHP_May... (p. 15).
Are the Mom & Pops going to deliver an order you place at 4 pm on your phone by 10 am the next morning? Because if not the antitrust measures you suggest are going to be deeply unpopular among a middle class that's used to having a stream of Amazon packages being delivered every day.
I think that largely depends on what you define as "efficient". I see nothing efficient about funneling profit margins to a larger single entity that may not live in the same state, or even the same country, versus going into local hands who spend most of their money locally.
Oh sure the large corporate model of stores may have a bigger pile of capital in their accounting book to spend versus the same grouping of small independent stores even if they were added together, but nowhere in the accounting book is there any mention of money leaving local economies and ultimately making it poorer and down the line reducing the value of the community which devalues the stores too.
Also a mom and pop store is far more likely to be able to and willing to break from the standard mold and let you call at 4 PM and then come pick something up at 7 PM after the store would normally be closed. That might also seem "inefficient" because now some employee is sitting around an extra two hours just to serve one customer. But what about the efficiency on the customer's side who may gain even greater value by having that thing ready to go at 5 am the next day?
Very few people are accounting for all the "efficiencies" that are not represented by capital holding in somebody's accounting book.
> Very few people are accounting for all the "efficiencies" that are not represented by capital holding in somebody's accounting book.
Yeah, my hometown is a good example of that. It has always had a population of around 300 people. When my dad was a kid it had a hardware store, a grocery store, a bowling alley, a restaurant, a pharmacy, and an auto repair shop.
Every single one of those shops closed and a big reason why they closed is because distributors decided they didn't want to deal with them anymore. So they raised their minimum order size and decrease the discount to the point where the same product could be had for a lower price by traveling 40 minutes away to the nearest Walmart or Home Depot. In fact, the grocery store closed while I was a kid and, in the end, what the owner was doing was literally going to walmart and reselling what they purchased retail.
That has had a cascading effect on the town and services available in town. It's also caused a number of longtime families to move out and away because the work they did dried up.
Where the small town had a large amount of economic activity and jobs, those all dried up to where now basically every kid born there moves away. There's no way for that town to grow and prosper.
> The problem is that the Mom & Pops are inefficient and the giants are efficient.
There are diminishing returns to efficiency. Grocery stores, for example, are just as efficient as Amazon is even though many of them are a fraction of the size. Something like a gas station will be just as efficient whether it's ran by a mom and pop or whether it's ran by Shell.
> Are the Mom & Pops going to deliver an order you place at 4 pm on your phone by 10 am the next morning?
Often yes, if it's in inventory. If it's not you'll have to wait longer than you would with amazon. In fact, one of the benefits of mom and pop shops is that they can generally get things delivered to you same day because they live in the same city as you do. Much like you get same day delivery from a restaurant even though they are often mom and pop shops.
But to my point above, you don't need a company the size of amazon to get next day delivery. Amazon could be broken up into several smaller (but still big) companies and it'd have close to exactly the same efficiency. It would also result in lower prices because now Amazon would have actual competition.
> We need new Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt anti-trust breakups to make capitalism work again.
Too bad the oligarchs slowly whittled away the government immune system until it was weak enough to infect last election cycle and is busy destroying what little is left. America seems to be headed into a feudal dark age. Once the government is toothless only the people can fix it with mass protest and/or violence.
There were oligarchs with massive amounts of power in the days of the Roosevelts. Rockefeller, Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Vanderbilt. These were all huge oligarchs that definitely fought to try and keep America in a feudal dark age.
Things seem bleak, but we've been here before and came out of it better.
Actually, 7-11 is a shrewd negotiator and will not invest anything over fixing something broken, and the landlord is not in charge here as these are all triple net. So it doesn’t matter who owns the land. But, yes, the corp running that business is thousands of miles away.
But the real issue here a that people stop at a 7-Eleven where if the same building in same condition said Bobs Convenience Store, they would not. We learned that decades ago.
I don't think there's anything to back up your last sentence. In my small city, there's at least four convenience store chains, and many of them use the owner's name as part of the street (advertised) name. There's also a lot of small convenience stores that are single owner, many serving immigrant communities.
The article spends a lot of time describing problems that I would see as a result of car centricity and land use patterns, but it just fails to make a point on why it’s a problem caused by REITs.
You can easily go to NYC and find entire neighborhoods owned by large absentee landlords and yet are still walkable and desirable to live in. Yes perhaps regulations and tax laws favor large firms, but in the end zoning laws can easily require those large firms to build desirable neighborhoods.
> You can easily go to NYC and find entire neighborhoods owned by large absentee landlords and yet are still walkable and desirable to live in.
Sure, because they were largely built a hundred years ago, and parceled into lots a hundred more before that, and because NYC remains uniquely friendly to continued mixed-use development today.
No. You can look at the recent Hudson Yards development. Largely owned by two companies, Related and Oxford Properties, the development is quite pleasant. The point is the city needs to be friendly to mixed-use development, not that big corporate or REIT ownership inherently leads to bad neighborhoods.
> You can look at the recent Hudson Yards development. Largely owned by two companies, Related and Oxford Properties, the development is quite pleasant.
You're using Hudson Yards as a positive development example? It's broadly hated for pretty much exactly the kind of large-scale developer homogenization discussed in the article.
This article is so badly written that I cannot tell whether its main point is homogenization or land use. Perhaps the author is just conflating the two intentionally. Take this sentence from the article about how a strip mall with a grocery store is the same in California and Massachusetts:
> But the sameness and isolation of our built environment is not just the work of the invisible hand; policies have also encouraged this trend.
See how the author conveniently lumps together sameness and isolation? My comments are responding the isolation part, and you are probably referring to sameness. This is how a badly written article causes commenters to talk past each other.
But specifically on the point of sameness and homogenization: I disagree here. I think most people are insufficiently attuned to the differences in buildings. Next time take a real camera, put yourself in a street photographer’s shoe and photograph the Hudson Yards neighborhood. Even the skyscrapers aren’t the same. There’s enough aesthetic variation there.
You also need customers who are OK with the fact that local businesses are going to be more expensive than Walmart or Costco and the corporate restaurants that are clustered around them. This sort of happens by default in neighborhoods where the externalities of car ownership are properly priced, because even though Joe's Grocery is more expensive, it's still cheaper to walk there and shop than it is to own a car and drive to a big supermarket. But it's difficult/impossible for these kinds of small businesses to flourish in the suburbs where the default is to drive everywhere. If I'm driving anyway, I might as well go get the best prices.
I'm certainly a fan of Japanese products. They are high-quality, etc. And everything was clean and orderly and amazing as a short-term visitor over 20 years ago. I would not be quick to say it is a better culture though, I suspect some negative are quite hidden, and lurking underneath the cultural norms. Again, as an outsider, I have lots of positive thoughts about Japanese culture.
They have a different culture and values, the US’s strengths lie in individualism and the character of the individuals that live here, and that’s both good and bad. But it’s entirely unsurprising that when responsibility and ownership is sharded up into trillions of tiny pieces and diffused that the outcome is awful.
In systems thinking, this would be called "intrinsic responsibility" (or lack thereof).
> Intrinsic responsibility” means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision making directly and quickly and compellingly to the decision makers. Because the pilot of a plane rides in the front of the plane, that pilot is intrinsically responsible. He or she will experience directly the consequences of his or her decisions.
> It doesn’t seem like aviation became safer because pilots took risks
That's pretty much the job of test pilots even today. They are usually dual trained pilots and engineers/technicians, and their job is basically to QA new planes. In military aviation especially test pilots are often feeders into the astronaut program (a different but similar type of daredevil).
On the contrary, rules and regulations are written in blood, and airplanes are manufactured stronger in different ways because pilots took risks. The Wings don't shear off when the pilot yanks the yoke left and up because someone did before, and the Wings either fell off or didn't - but until it happened, the wings were an unknown quantity. And that's just one example.
That's basically the job description of a Test Pilot.
I want to see what the author considers a nice 7-11 for contrast, because it seems normal to me? Could be more walkable of course but I'm not sure that's on the REIT. They didn't lay out the roads or anything.
The wood paneling and nice front lights actually seem like an improvement over local 7-11s if anything.
By that logic, I also own a microscopic share in all sorts of businesses, many of which have their own sadness or disinterest.
Is there anything that makes real-estate significantly different, beyond how the pathos can be more-easily photographed?
In other words, I expect the (legitimate) issues raised in the article have close analogues in legal/financial/incentive problems for other forms of investment.
> The shortcoming of such analyses is that they make it difficult to capture the value that would accrue to a project that created a neighborhood.
Sounds like an opportunity for experts in the field to develop and sell a good kind of analysis!
Though point-taken: It'd still be hard to attract cautious investors until something is perceived as "proven".
So Vanguard owns one-eighth of ADC, an REIT whose stock price has declined 2.65% in the last 5 years. Surely there is space in the market for a smaller, leaner, possibly privately-owned REIT whose values more closely align with 2026 values and will one day be able to eat ADC's lunch.
CRE is a tough market right now, but you would think that a little bit of minimal creativity and effort could make an impact. I get annoyed with the overreliance on murals to provide faux authenticity, but even that is usually better than a bland box.
Commercial real estate got walloped by covid and the damage is still making its way through the system. A 2.65% decline in the last 5 years is probably one of the better performers in the sector.
Zoning might be seen as a way of getting local control over property that’s actually owned by someone else, for better or worse. Developers often have to make concessions to local governments to get approval, and NIMBYism has its downsides.
A local government has options like creating a historical district if they really want to control aesthetics. A home owner’s association can control aesthetics in a residential area. They are just people and you might disagree with their decisions.
Real estate is expensive. Large commercial properties usually require rich owners. the local gentry that owns farms and car dealerships and shopping malls and fast-food franchises isn’t necessarily any more interested in aethetics than an REIT.
It seems like land-use governance is always going to be messy no matter how it’s structured?
seems like aesthetically it matches its surroundings. it doesn't seem like an outlier in the neighborhood which kind of defeats the premise of the article.
I'll never miss an opportunity to promote this TED talk from James Kunstler[1]. It's a real pleasure to see a skilled hater take a vile trend to task and he does so with gusto. It's from 2004 and really feels like it, but the central points remain just as true today.
Pure market based solutions will never work and neither will restrictive planning policies. The only way to bring back real neighborhoods is to completely remove fixed zoning for direct neighbor votes or local councils deciding individual projects, and create a federal investment fund that will give cheap loans to builders who plan to do what the community actually wants.
Of course the root cause of this is wealth concentration, and that's not something you can fix with a couple new laws.
How is it wealth concentration? TFA claims the opposite - distributed ownership as the cause.
I agree with you about planning. Councils keep wanting to control how their neighborhoods look - because people who live there don't want their own stupid neighbors making their own decisions and "ruining" it. So they impose rules that lead to uniformity. Where I live, most new houses look indistinguishable from each other, but they all have the same multi colored offset walls with two different cladding types and alternating angles of their roofs. A style guideline made by the council to force them to look interesting.
Except the distributed ownership is FAR from being anywhere near evenly distributed. 7-11 doesn't have half the population holding 50%+ of its value. It has 50% of the population holding 1% of the business, 1% holding 10% of the business, and then 0.1% holding 50%+ of the business.
I think we're in agreement that commodification is often harmful, and should be constrained more than it currently is. It seems many of our fellow commenters are pretty enthusiastic about turning everything into a financial asset, though.
On the flip side: your retirement is dependent on the property listed in the article and if no improvements are needed while it generates a return…
It means you’re a landlord!
Congratulations!!
Give yourself a round of applause. By not maintaining it, you are electing to keep cash flow high and profits secured. The overall commercial market has negative numbers so even if said REIT is down 2.65% it’s hedged together with numerous properties in a nice geographic arbitrage opportunity to minimize losses.
Landlords and rent seeking are bad by its very nature. Sometimes people got no choice but to deal with the devil, but the fact that people that are forced to deal with the devil doesn't make it any better or acceptable to increase dealings with the devil.
I suppose that depends on whether you’re a human being who lives in a place or an investment portfolio. A lot of people seem to get confused about that, but as a human, I’d say I don’t love the outcomes here, personal portfolio performance notwithstanding, and might be willing to trade a couple points for a living environment that isn’t a soulless budget management exercise.
As a friend once noted, the great thing about living in America instead of Europe is that we make enough money living here instead of there that we’re able to take vacations in Europe.
A common saying is that in real estate, you make your money when you buy and when you sell, in other words not paying too much and timing sales to profit from appreciation. Cash flow from rent isn't a big part of it, that normally covers taxes, insurance, debt servicing, and maintenance but not a whole lot more.
I've been investing in real estate for decades now, and the version I've always heard is that you make your money when you buy, NOT when you sell.
Also, other than flippers, the vast majority of real estate investors I'm familiar with are very focused on buying cashflow, and prefer never to sell. It might be different for REITs focused on CRE, I'm not as familiar with that space, but my impression has always been that the biggest and most successful investors are buying and holding, not trading.
Sure, if you're buying in an appreciating area, and the rent covers the carrying costs, you hang on to the property as long as you can or as long as the property is a still a good fit in your diversification plan.
I would agree that not overpaying is probably the most important thing.
True, but in exchange, “you” (meaning all of us) get to live out our lives and eventually our retirements in a bland, depressing facsimile of a culture.
I think neighborhoods that people see as "authentic" are actually bland and depressing to their initial occupants. Do you want to live in an outdoor museum for the sake of strangers who don't suffer the routine grind of poor-people life to come and oggle your mismatched buildings and blankets hanging over your balconies?
There are some historic districts in my hometown and it's because they have rows of posh but nearly identical houses. That uniformity seems to be part of what makes now gives them "character".
Well yes, but usually the initial occupants are long gone before these neighborhoods become desirable. Some of it is rarity, but some of it is the presence of design elements (whether accidental or intentional) that aren’t present in most newer developments. Sometimes this is because the buildings have features that aren’t allowed under newer building codes, and sometimes the neighborhoods grew organically when land was cheaper, so you get better walkability or interesting neighborhood features.
It’s possible to build new buildings that are interesting and unique, it’s just very expensive under current zoning, building codes, and local planning restrictions, so it usually only happens with very large structures.
"You" is 10-20% of the US population. The rest will never actually be able to afford retirement, and have no investments. 50% don't have an extra $500 in case of emergency.
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edit: Financial literacy is not alchemy. It will not turn nothing into something. The price of consumption has risen insanely (which is why investors have done well), and consumption when you're poor is not optional or luxurious.
There may not be a lump of labor, but there's certainly a lump of profit. 10-20% are getting it because 80-90% aren't. We've created a society (again) where the people who are most rewarded are the people who work the least (and whine about school lunches and shoplifting.) Owning things is the most lucrative job you can have; if you exclusively own and don't work, you've probably doubled or tripled your worth since covid. If you worked, at the lowest end you've barely kept your head above water, and at the middle end you've lost major ground. If you're either lower or middle, and you've accidentally reproduced (bad morlock!), you could be homeless after a single bad year.
With the high end worker is where you need financial literacy; but if you don't spend enough, how are you going to meet the people who will employ you or find you employment? Assuming they'll come to your small, somewhat comfortable apartment far from your workplace, attracted by your home haircuts and your cheap but comfortable clothes to have conversations about your used books, houseplants, and how hard your bicycle commute is, over one of your three board games - you've now moved the meter to 15-25% being able to retire one day. Congratulations, you're European.
Objection 1: Are you arguing that it's not 50%, but more like 40%? Because I wasn't attempting an exact figure. You gave me a median number that is under a Bronze plan's deductible. One concussion will bankrupt them. A childbirth will throw them into $10Ks of debt.
Objection 2: 50% report owning stock in a Gallup poll. Which I'm sure includes at least 60% saying "you mean some money in a 401K?" Temp services have 401Ks that some people have contributed hundreds of dollars to.
> Are you arguing that it's not 50%, but more like 40%? Because I wasn't attempting an exact figure. You gave me a median number that is under a Bronze plan's deductible. One concussion will bankrupt them. A childbirth will throw them into $10Ks of debt.
OK then say that! The made up $500 emergency number is not true and thus not an effective argument. The precariousness and contingency of healthy and self-sufficient life as regards $5-10,000 emergencies absolutely is an effective argument! You take my statement of fact as a statement of opinion counter to yours when we are probably closer than you'd think.
Funny enough it was getting my wages garnished to pay for the MRI that my insurance didn't cover after I got a concussion when I was hit by a car on my bike commute that got me really into politics that demand we apply material analysis to material conditions, if you catch my meaning.
Maybe things have changed since 2022, but per the Fed's survey that year, the median American had $8,000 in transaction accounts alone (not unrealized stock gains, vehicles, houses, retirement, etc.). Because that's a median, 50% of the population had that much or more. By age cohort, the smallest median dollar amount was under 35s with $5,400, and the largest was 65-74s with $13,400
Those numbers are usually a bit iffy, but also retirement funds and emergency funds are separate things and you can have a retirement fund without a big emergency fund. If your plan for a rare emergency is "don't pay off the credit card in full for two months" then that's probably fine.
1. I’ll be in that cohort so yes, I hope it’d be around.
2. There is a cost of living adjustment matched to inflation.
3. It was supposed to supplement your retirement not fund it.
But I do agree it is on shaky ground with the current administration and the future of the US dollar in the world. The problem is, if I’m critical of it and it crashes, I get nothing. So why would I be critical of my own interest?
Do I have alternatives such as buying vanguard ETFs and minimizing risk? Yes, is that the primary vehicle? More assurance than social security, that’s for sure.
As a frequent walker to the 7-11 in my "soul-crushing suburban district", I decided to look up the 7-11 landscape in Williamsburg, Virginia using the satellite view in Google Maps. Every single one of them is walkable from residential property.
My guess is the author lives in a densely populated urban area, and doesn't understand how "soul-crushing suburban districts" really work.
I've been walking to my 7-11 for over 30 years, and have gotten to know many attendants over the years.
It's certainly walkable from the hotels, and the houses/apartments to the north, but not the ones to the south as there's a stream in the way (see OpenStreetMap) but no footbridges.
The author has some valid points (i.e. people criticise business decisions made to appease shareholders without realising they may be the shareholders in a roundabout way) but chose some rather odd examples as proof.
Way to miss the entire point of the article. It’s not anti 7-11, it’s against underinvestment in local properties and lack of reasonable planning, driven by distant ownership.
I can also walk to a convenience store, in fact I’m fairly lucky with the amenities available in my neighborhood, but many places I’ve been (and previously lived) are disorganized and lack the livability of communities where the buildings have primarily local owners.
You seem really stuck on 7-11. The article is not about 7-11. That’s just the example the author used, and honestly the author could have picked a better one. Just imagine that they picked vape shops or something instead.
I have lived in places where you can’t walk anywhere useful because the absentee owners didn’t want to invest in finding good tenants. The buildings were fine, but partially empty, and there was even a shortage of local office space, so they could have rented at a premium with just a little bit of investment.
7-11's, which I frequent often, need a slightly higher food quality selection to appease affluents like me, but as far as how they look, that's what a 7-11 looks like! It's what I look for when I'm driving, on "stroads" / highways, and am looking for an exactly predictable experience, one which is low-key, inexpensive, and does not imply a formal dress code. I'd never want a 7-11 to look like a brownstone in the west village, that would imply an entirely different kind of business establishment.
This does seem like a fair criticism, the 7-11 style seems fine to me. (The food selection is much better in Japanese 7-11s, though.) When I see them they are usually in better shape than other nearby stations.
Small touches such as landscaping can really make a difference. For example, 7-11s at the beach often seem to put in a little more effort, although I don’t know if that’s the store or the landlord.
yes japanese 7-11s are exactly what i had in mind. a 7-11 that also has good quality sushi to go would be amazing. it's commonplace in bodegas in NYC (more the Asian owned ones) for example. that and, just one actual dark chocolate selection amidst the piles of low-quality milk chocolate M&Ms and hershey products. it's not a big ask.
The decline of the classic US fast food restaurants (McD's, Wendy's, BK) has been matched by gas station food getting better and better. The 7-11 breakfast sandwiches are pretty good these days and sometimes the hamburgers even taste like real meat :) .
The linked letter has absolutely nothing to do with TFA other than a very tenuous link to Vanguard: It was written a founder who hasn't been in charge of Vanguard for several decades.
This is a stupid article. "Sad" is not an objective criterion. Is IKEA furniture sad? I think the author would say so.
I _love_ the pictured 7-Elevens, especially the one in Austin, TX. They are perfectly functional: you drop in, get whatever items you need, and get out in seconds. Everything is designed to help you with that.
The parking lot is a necessity for convenience stores because you likely won't invest 30-40 minutes of your time to _walk_ to a convenience store. You might as well just walk to a full-blown store. The exceptions are, of course, "food deserts" where the density death spiral has hit the bottom and made the city unliveable (see: Manhattan, Tokyo).
The places like "Captains Row" are beautiful to look at but hellish to actually _live_ in. Ask me how I know. They are the equivalent of the restored classic cars: beautiful to look at, but unsafe and uncomfortable for actual use compared to modern cars.
Absentee owners should be taxed out of existence. The distance between an investment and the people who understand it is a law enforcement liability (it encourages fraud), a public liability (it inevitably concentrates ownership who can easily lobby and get bailouts), and leads to missed opportunities and inefficient use.
The mass US real estate fraud that ended in 2008 was entirely built around loaning money to people who weren't creditworthy for overvalued property that they had no expertise to judge, then immediately selling that loan to somebody who would hide it in a complex product and immediately sell it again. Eventually, these was sold to municipalities and pension funds in complex gambling vehicles whose value would fall to zero if anything went wrong in this structure, after being branded "AAA" by institutions 1) paid by the people selling the products, and 2) literally written into legislation by name and into the rules governing the pension funds.
That's what distance between an investor and in investment gets you. Tax every single hop. Make them break themselves up.
edit: Yes it does. Tax them. These transactions cost the public more than direct transactions. I know that people feel like they're far beyond having to justify a tax other than "I like it, so don't tax it," but this distance in and of itself imposes costs to the public. If you dump money into Vanguard, and Vanguard then invests in an index, Vanguard gets taxed and you get taxed, too. Poof, no more Vanguard. The horrible outcome of that is that people understand the stocks they're investing in, and that the stock market becomes a repository of intelligence - which is what I thought was supposed to justify it.
Nobody cares about justice, though. They're libertarians when they're rich and revolutionaries when they're poor. Government to protect my stuff when I have stuff, government that gives me stuff when I don't have stuff.
In the past 7-Eleven was unique in the franchise world where you could make a comfortable living owning a single store and that was the major ownership model. McDonalds and other options at the time really depended on a multi-store ownership model. Corporate 7-Eleven (Southland Corp technically) moved away from this single store model in the mid to late 90's, instead preferring single, larger corporations in a region, owning 10+ stores over a single store owner. They made this happen over a 20 year span by changing the contracts franchisees sign and must to re-sign every x years. Every contract renewal drastically reduced the single store income and made it much harder for single store owners to make a living. Corporate also started preferring to give new stores to existing, large scale franchises over new store owners which changes the initial capital needed for a store by over 10x as with an existing store you will have to pay the rights from the previous franchisee instead of just the corporate.
My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles all own or have owned 7-Eleven stores and have since the 80's. I've worked there, been to their conferences, and still get to hear about them at all family gatherings :)
McDonalds was the same early on, but evolved into a real-estate operation that also sells hamburgers.
Last I knew (this was the 1990s) there were still a few single-store franchisees but most franchisees owned at least half a dozen stores in a market. I also think the investment required to buy a franchise is vastly larger than it was in the beginning. It's really only affordable to owners who can leverage the income they are making from the stores they already own.
AFAIK they do still require owners to be operators. You can't own a McDonalds franchise passively. But I'm not sure that's still the case.
Back in the 80's you still needed to have multiple stores. Otherwise your overhead from back office and maintenance stuff would just eat up too much profits. Once you hit three stores, you could start to make serious money if you ran a tight ship.
I don't know if it's causative, but that seems to coincide with the move from Southland Corp to being run by the Japanese parent Seven & i Holdings.
Not to be a contrarian but that vanilla look is what creates traction or commerce. When we pull into a 7-Eleven weather in Seattle or Florida people want the same experience and the same expectations. And as such with end with liminal space. A sad space where the coffee and the Slim-Jim are the same. The familiarity of nowhere or anywhere America.
This was my home gas station for 4 years so I may be biased, but it is fine. Symptomatic of a deeper car-centric problem, sure.
I have fond high school memories at gas stations
Younger than that for me. As kids in elementary school my friends and I used to ride our bikes to the gas station at the entrance to our subdivision. They only had like one rack of candy bars and a soda vending machine, but for a 10 year old with some change in his pocket that was great.
This was the mid-1970s.
There was a larger "convenience store" at the other end of the next subdivision, you could bike to it but it was a few miles so we went there less often. They had a lot more snack choices though, and you could get a glimpse of the covers of the Playboy magazines that were on the shelf behind the counter.
I think part of the reason the US doesn't feel like the US anymore is that ownership of properties is no longer Bob who dreamed of some day opening a Pizza shop on Main st. It's all corporate now, all the way down.
Yup. Consolidation of the markets is ultimately what's destroyed small businesses. It's currently working on the likes of dentists and vets.
The US has devolved to the point where only someone with a large amount of wealth can start and run a business. You can't open up a small hardware shop anymore because no bank will give that loan and no supplier will give you the same wholesale prices they give to the likes of Home Depot or Lowes or heck even Walmart.
At every level in the supply distribution system we've seen consolidation and ultimately locking out of competition.
For example, here's why independent pharmacists have been going out of business [1]. We need new Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt anti-trust breakups to make capitalism work again. Capitalism can't work without a diverse competitive market.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmZtBW54GNI
I agree with your point, but there's a fundamental problem you need to consider. The problem is that the Mom & Pops are inefficient and the giants are efficient. Amazon exemplifies the consolidation problem you're talking about. But it has a favorability rating of 78%, ahead of the U.S. military, the police, and the CDC: https://harvardharrispoll.com/assets/uploads/2023/05/HHP_May... (p. 15).
Are the Mom & Pops going to deliver an order you place at 4 pm on your phone by 10 am the next morning? Because if not the antitrust measures you suggest are going to be deeply unpopular among a middle class that's used to having a stream of Amazon packages being delivered every day.
I think that largely depends on what you define as "efficient". I see nothing efficient about funneling profit margins to a larger single entity that may not live in the same state, or even the same country, versus going into local hands who spend most of their money locally.
Oh sure the large corporate model of stores may have a bigger pile of capital in their accounting book to spend versus the same grouping of small independent stores even if they were added together, but nowhere in the accounting book is there any mention of money leaving local economies and ultimately making it poorer and down the line reducing the value of the community which devalues the stores too.
Also a mom and pop store is far more likely to be able to and willing to break from the standard mold and let you call at 4 PM and then come pick something up at 7 PM after the store would normally be closed. That might also seem "inefficient" because now some employee is sitting around an extra two hours just to serve one customer. But what about the efficiency on the customer's side who may gain even greater value by having that thing ready to go at 5 am the next day?
Very few people are accounting for all the "efficiencies" that are not represented by capital holding in somebody's accounting book.
> Very few people are accounting for all the "efficiencies" that are not represented by capital holding in somebody's accounting book.
Yeah, my hometown is a good example of that. It has always had a population of around 300 people. When my dad was a kid it had a hardware store, a grocery store, a bowling alley, a restaurant, a pharmacy, and an auto repair shop.
Every single one of those shops closed and a big reason why they closed is because distributors decided they didn't want to deal with them anymore. So they raised their minimum order size and decrease the discount to the point where the same product could be had for a lower price by traveling 40 minutes away to the nearest Walmart or Home Depot. In fact, the grocery store closed while I was a kid and, in the end, what the owner was doing was literally going to walmart and reselling what they purchased retail.
That has had a cascading effect on the town and services available in town. It's also caused a number of longtime families to move out and away because the work they did dried up.
Where the small town had a large amount of economic activity and jobs, those all dried up to where now basically every kid born there moves away. There's no way for that town to grow and prosper.
> The problem is that the Mom & Pops are inefficient and the giants are efficient.
There are diminishing returns to efficiency. Grocery stores, for example, are just as efficient as Amazon is even though many of them are a fraction of the size. Something like a gas station will be just as efficient whether it's ran by a mom and pop or whether it's ran by Shell.
> Are the Mom & Pops going to deliver an order you place at 4 pm on your phone by 10 am the next morning?
Often yes, if it's in inventory. If it's not you'll have to wait longer than you would with amazon. In fact, one of the benefits of mom and pop shops is that they can generally get things delivered to you same day because they live in the same city as you do. Much like you get same day delivery from a restaurant even though they are often mom and pop shops.
But to my point above, you don't need a company the size of amazon to get next day delivery. Amazon could be broken up into several smaller (but still big) companies and it'd have close to exactly the same efficiency. It would also result in lower prices because now Amazon would have actual competition.
> We need new Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt anti-trust breakups to make capitalism work again.
Too bad the oligarchs slowly whittled away the government immune system until it was weak enough to infect last election cycle and is busy destroying what little is left. America seems to be headed into a feudal dark age. Once the government is toothless only the people can fix it with mass protest and/or violence.
There were oligarchs with massive amounts of power in the days of the Roosevelts. Rockefeller, Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Vanderbilt. These were all huge oligarchs that definitely fought to try and keep America in a feudal dark age.
Things seem bleak, but we've been here before and came out of it better.
Actually, 7-11 is a shrewd negotiator and will not invest anything over fixing something broken, and the landlord is not in charge here as these are all triple net. So it doesn’t matter who owns the land. But, yes, the corp running that business is thousands of miles away.
But the real issue here a that people stop at a 7-Eleven where if the same building in same condition said Bobs Convenience Store, they would not. We learned that decades ago.
I don't think there's anything to back up your last sentence. In my small city, there's at least four convenience store chains, and many of them use the owner's name as part of the street (advertised) name. There's also a lot of small convenience stores that are single owner, many serving immigrant communities.
The article spends a lot of time describing problems that I would see as a result of car centricity and land use patterns, but it just fails to make a point on why it’s a problem caused by REITs.
You can easily go to NYC and find entire neighborhoods owned by large absentee landlords and yet are still walkable and desirable to live in. Yes perhaps regulations and tax laws favor large firms, but in the end zoning laws can easily require those large firms to build desirable neighborhoods.
> You can easily go to NYC and find entire neighborhoods owned by large absentee landlords and yet are still walkable and desirable to live in.
Sure, because they were largely built a hundred years ago, and parceled into lots a hundred more before that, and because NYC remains uniquely friendly to continued mixed-use development today.
No. You can look at the recent Hudson Yards development. Largely owned by two companies, Related and Oxford Properties, the development is quite pleasant. The point is the city needs to be friendly to mixed-use development, not that big corporate or REIT ownership inherently leads to bad neighborhoods.
> You can look at the recent Hudson Yards development. Largely owned by two companies, Related and Oxford Properties, the development is quite pleasant.
You're using Hudson Yards as a positive development example? It's broadly hated for pretty much exactly the kind of large-scale developer homogenization discussed in the article.
This article is so badly written that I cannot tell whether its main point is homogenization or land use. Perhaps the author is just conflating the two intentionally. Take this sentence from the article about how a strip mall with a grocery store is the same in California and Massachusetts:
> But the sameness and isolation of our built environment is not just the work of the invisible hand; policies have also encouraged this trend.
See how the author conveniently lumps together sameness and isolation? My comments are responding the isolation part, and you are probably referring to sameness. This is how a badly written article causes commenters to talk past each other.
But specifically on the point of sameness and homogenization: I disagree here. I think most people are insufficiently attuned to the differences in buildings. Next time take a real camera, put yourself in a street photographer’s shoe and photograph the Hudson Yards neighborhood. Even the skyscrapers aren’t the same. There’s enough aesthetic variation there.
You also need customers who are OK with the fact that local businesses are going to be more expensive than Walmart or Costco and the corporate restaurants that are clustered around them. This sort of happens by default in neighborhoods where the externalities of car ownership are properly priced, because even though Joe's Grocery is more expensive, it's still cheaper to walk there and shop than it is to own a car and drive to a big supermarket. But it's difficult/impossible for these kinds of small businesses to flourish in the suburbs where the default is to drive everywhere. If I'm driving anyway, I might as well go get the best prices.
No, this is just poor management. Japanese 7-11s are ran better because of better culture, products and management. It's not magic.
I'm certainly a fan of Japanese products. They are high-quality, etc. And everything was clean and orderly and amazing as a short-term visitor over 20 years ago. I would not be quick to say it is a better culture though, I suspect some negative are quite hidden, and lurking underneath the cultural norms. Again, as an outsider, I have lots of positive thoughts about Japanese culture.
They have a different culture and values, the US’s strengths lie in individualism and the character of the individuals that live here, and that’s both good and bad. But it’s entirely unsurprising that when responsibility and ownership is sharded up into trillions of tiny pieces and diffused that the outcome is awful.
I tend to agree with you
In systems thinking, this would be called "intrinsic responsibility" (or lack thereof).
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12139955-intrinsic-responsi...How does that work, though? In the early days, pilots were daredevils. It doesn’t seem like aviation became safer because pilots took risks?
Workspace safety didn’t improve by blaming the workers, even though they bore the risk.
> It doesn’t seem like aviation became safer because pilots took risks
That's pretty much the job of test pilots even today. They are usually dual trained pilots and engineers/technicians, and their job is basically to QA new planes. In military aviation especially test pilots are often feeders into the astronaut program (a different but similar type of daredevil).
Workplace safety improved massively when labor unions became a thing and workers got a say in safety standards.
The workers were not the decision makers.
On the contrary, rules and regulations are written in blood, and airplanes are manufactured stronger in different ways because pilots took risks. The Wings don't shear off when the pilot yanks the yoke left and up because someone did before, and the Wings either fell off or didn't - but until it happened, the wings were an unknown quantity. And that's just one example.
That's basically the job description of a Test Pilot.
I want to see what the author considers a nice 7-11 for contrast, because it seems normal to me? Could be more walkable of course but I'm not sure that's on the REIT. They didn't lay out the roads or anything.
The wood paneling and nice front lights actually seem like an improvement over local 7-11s if anything.
Yeah, I was thinking the same — this one looks nicer than the ones near me.
By that logic, I also own a microscopic share in all sorts of businesses, many of which have their own sadness or disinterest.
Is there anything that makes real-estate significantly different, beyond how the pathos can be more-easily photographed?
In other words, I expect the (legitimate) issues raised in the article have close analogues in legal/financial/incentive problems for other forms of investment.
> The shortcoming of such analyses is that they make it difficult to capture the value that would accrue to a project that created a neighborhood.
Sounds like an opportunity for experts in the field to develop and sell a good kind of analysis!
Though point-taken: It'd still be hard to attract cautious investors until something is perceived as "proven".
So Vanguard owns one-eighth of ADC, an REIT whose stock price has declined 2.65% in the last 5 years. Surely there is space in the market for a smaller, leaner, possibly privately-owned REIT whose values more closely align with 2026 values and will one day be able to eat ADC's lunch.
CRE is a tough market right now, but you would think that a little bit of minimal creativity and effort could make an impact. I get annoyed with the overreliance on murals to provide faux authenticity, but even that is usually better than a bland box.
Commercial real estate got walloped by covid and the damage is still making its way through the system. A 2.65% decline in the last 5 years is probably one of the better performers in the sector.
I think the tax incentives of an REIT pretty much mandate it be publicly traded?
only a 2.65% decline in a commercial real estate REIT is probably beating the market
Zoning might be seen as a way of getting local control over property that’s actually owned by someone else, for better or worse. Developers often have to make concessions to local governments to get approval, and NIMBYism has its downsides.
A local government has options like creating a historical district if they really want to control aesthetics. A home owner’s association can control aesthetics in a residential area. They are just people and you might disagree with their decisions.
Real estate is expensive. Large commercial properties usually require rich owners. the local gentry that owns farms and car dealerships and shopping malls and fast-food franchises isn’t necessarily any more interested in aethetics than an REIT.
It seems like land-use governance is always going to be messy no matter how it’s structured?
seems like aesthetically it matches its surroundings. it doesn't seem like an outlier in the neighborhood which kind of defeats the premise of the article.
I'll never miss an opportunity to promote this TED talk from James Kunstler[1]. It's a real pleasure to see a skilled hater take a vile trend to task and he does so with gusto. It's from 2004 and really feels like it, but the central points remain just as true today.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_the_ghastly_...
Pure market based solutions will never work and neither will restrictive planning policies. The only way to bring back real neighborhoods is to completely remove fixed zoning for direct neighbor votes or local councils deciding individual projects, and create a federal investment fund that will give cheap loans to builders who plan to do what the community actually wants.
Of course the root cause of this is wealth concentration, and that's not something you can fix with a couple new laws.
How is it wealth concentration? TFA claims the opposite - distributed ownership as the cause.
I agree with you about planning. Councils keep wanting to control how their neighborhoods look - because people who live there don't want their own stupid neighbors making their own decisions and "ruining" it. So they impose rules that lead to uniformity. Where I live, most new houses look indistinguishable from each other, but they all have the same multi colored offset walls with two different cladding types and alternating angles of their roofs. A style guideline made by the council to force them to look interesting.
Except the distributed ownership is FAR from being anywhere near evenly distributed. 7-11 doesn't have half the population holding 50%+ of its value. It has 50% of the population holding 1% of the business, 1% holding 10% of the business, and then 0.1% holding 50%+ of the business.
the commodification of everything, just one more example. once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
I think we're in agreement that commodification is often harmful, and should be constrained more than it currently is. It seems many of our fellow commenters are pretty enthusiastic about turning everything into a financial asset, though.
It looks like a normal 7-Eleven.
On the flip side: your retirement is dependent on the property listed in the article and if no improvements are needed while it generates a return…
It means you’re a landlord!
Congratulations!!
Give yourself a round of applause. By not maintaining it, you are electing to keep cash flow high and profits secured. The overall commercial market has negative numbers so even if said REIT is down 2.65% it’s hedged together with numerous properties in a nice geographic arbitrage opportunity to minimize losses.
Is that really… So bad?
Landlords and rent seeking are bad by its very nature. Sometimes people got no choice but to deal with the devil, but the fact that people that are forced to deal with the devil doesn't make it any better or acceptable to increase dealings with the devil.
I suppose that depends on whether you’re a human being who lives in a place or an investment portfolio. A lot of people seem to get confused about that, but as a human, I’d say I don’t love the outcomes here, personal portfolio performance notwithstanding, and might be willing to trade a couple points for a living environment that isn’t a soulless budget management exercise.
As a friend once noted, the great thing about living in America instead of Europe is that we make enough money living here instead of there that we’re able to take vacations in Europe.
A common saying is that in real estate, you make your money when you buy and when you sell, in other words not paying too much and timing sales to profit from appreciation. Cash flow from rent isn't a big part of it, that normally covers taxes, insurance, debt servicing, and maintenance but not a whole lot more.
Well, it depends, if you’re going for ARV and appreciation, cash flow helps a lot on holding costs.
While I agree with you make money when you buy/biggerpockets quotes, you want cash flow to minimize holding costs.
I've been investing in real estate for decades now, and the version I've always heard is that you make your money when you buy, NOT when you sell.
Also, other than flippers, the vast majority of real estate investors I'm familiar with are very focused on buying cashflow, and prefer never to sell. It might be different for REITs focused on CRE, I'm not as familiar with that space, but my impression has always been that the biggest and most successful investors are buying and holding, not trading.
Sure, if you're buying in an appreciating area, and the rent covers the carrying costs, you hang on to the property as long as you can or as long as the property is a still a good fit in your diversification plan.
I would agree that not overpaying is probably the most important thing.
True, but in exchange, “you” (meaning all of us) get to live out our lives and eventually our retirements in a bland, depressing facsimile of a culture.
I think neighborhoods that people see as "authentic" are actually bland and depressing to their initial occupants. Do you want to live in an outdoor museum for the sake of strangers who don't suffer the routine grind of poor-people life to come and oggle your mismatched buildings and blankets hanging over your balconies?
There are some historic districts in my hometown and it's because they have rows of posh but nearly identical houses. That uniformity seems to be part of what makes now gives them "character".
Well yes, but usually the initial occupants are long gone before these neighborhoods become desirable. Some of it is rarity, but some of it is the presence of design elements (whether accidental or intentional) that aren’t present in most newer developments. Sometimes this is because the buildings have features that aren’t allowed under newer building codes, and sometimes the neighborhoods grew organically when land was cheaper, so you get better walkability or interesting neighborhood features.
It’s possible to build new buildings that are interesting and unique, it’s just very expensive under current zoning, building codes, and local planning restrictions, so it usually only happens with very large structures.
"You" is 10-20% of the US population. The rest will never actually be able to afford retirement, and have no investments. 50% don't have an extra $500 in case of emergency.
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edit: Financial literacy is not alchemy. It will not turn nothing into something. The price of consumption has risen insanely (which is why investors have done well), and consumption when you're poor is not optional or luxurious.
There may not be a lump of labor, but there's certainly a lump of profit. 10-20% are getting it because 80-90% aren't. We've created a society (again) where the people who are most rewarded are the people who work the least (and whine about school lunches and shoplifting.) Owning things is the most lucrative job you can have; if you exclusively own and don't work, you've probably doubled or tripled your worth since covid. If you worked, at the lowest end you've barely kept your head above water, and at the middle end you've lost major ground. If you're either lower or middle, and you've accidentally reproduced (bad morlock!), you could be homeless after a single bad year.
With the high end worker is where you need financial literacy; but if you don't spend enough, how are you going to meet the people who will employ you or find you employment? Assuming they'll come to your small, somewhat comfortable apartment far from your workplace, attracted by your home haircuts and your cheap but comfortable clothes to have conversations about your used books, houseplants, and how hard your bicycle commute is, over one of your three board games - you've now moved the meter to 15-25% being able to retire one day. Congratulations, you're European.
Objection 1: Are you arguing that it's not 50%, but more like 40%? Because I wasn't attempting an exact figure. You gave me a median number that is under a Bronze plan's deductible. One concussion will bankrupt them. A childbirth will throw them into $10Ks of debt.
Objection 2: 50% report owning stock in a Gallup poll. Which I'm sure includes at least 60% saying "you mean some money in a 401K?" Temp services have 401Ks that some people have contributed hundreds of dollars to.
> Are you arguing that it's not 50%, but more like 40%? Because I wasn't attempting an exact figure. You gave me a median number that is under a Bronze plan's deductible. One concussion will bankrupt them. A childbirth will throw them into $10Ks of debt.
OK then say that! The made up $500 emergency number is not true and thus not an effective argument. The precariousness and contingency of healthy and self-sufficient life as regards $5-10,000 emergencies absolutely is an effective argument! You take my statement of fact as a statement of opinion counter to yours when we are probably closer than you'd think.
Funny enough it was getting my wages garnished to pay for the MRI that my insurance didn't cover after I got a concussion when I was hit by a car on my bike commute that got me really into politics that demand we apply material analysis to material conditions, if you catch my meaning.
Maybe things have changed since 2022, but per the Fed's survey that year, the median American had $8,000 in transaction accounts alone (not unrealized stock gains, vehicles, houses, retirement, etc.). Because that's a median, 50% of the population had that much or more. By age cohort, the smallest median dollar amount was under 35s with $5,400, and the largest was 65-74s with $13,400
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart...
Those numbers are usually a bit iffy, but also retirement funds and emergency funds are separate things and you can have a retirement fund without a big emergency fund. If your plan for a rare emergency is "don't pay off the credit card in full for two months" then that's probably fine.
Well over 50% of the US population has investments. https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-own...
You’re not wrong, but the onus is on whom to provide financial literacy?
The majority of people do have a safety net in social security. While it may not be enough, it is something…
Is it something? like do you think the program will still be around in 50 years for today's graduates, etc?
1. I’ll be in that cohort so yes, I hope it’d be around.
2. There is a cost of living adjustment matched to inflation.
3. It was supposed to supplement your retirement not fund it.
But I do agree it is on shaky ground with the current administration and the future of the US dollar in the world. The problem is, if I’m critical of it and it crashes, I get nothing. So why would I be critical of my own interest?
Do I have alternatives such as buying vanguard ETFs and minimizing risk? Yes, is that the primary vehicle? More assurance than social security, that’s for sure.
But who knows what’d happen in 25 years.
> the onus is on whom to provide financial literacy
Should be a huge part of the K-12 curriculum in a putative capitalist country, but we barely touch on it.
Kids graduate high school and don't really understand time value of money or how a credit card, a 401k, a car loan, or a mortgage work.
Land value tax would solve this.
Ah, perfect. A patronizing tone to start off the article. Where have I seen this before?
As a frequent walker to the 7-11 in my "soul-crushing suburban district", I decided to look up the 7-11 landscape in Williamsburg, Virginia using the satellite view in Google Maps. Every single one of them is walkable from residential property.
My guess is the author lives in a densely populated urban area, and doesn't understand how "soul-crushing suburban districts" really work.
I've been walking to my 7-11 for over 30 years, and have gotten to know many attendants over the years.
I think this is the 7-Eleven in question, as it's surrounded by hotels as described: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Y473E3DneooQ4CJQ8
It's certainly walkable from the hotels, and the houses/apartments to the north, but not the ones to the south as there's a stream in the way (see OpenStreetMap) but no footbridges.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/37.282725/-76.711704
The author has some valid points (i.e. people criticise business decisions made to appease shareholders without realising they may be the shareholders in a roundabout way) but chose some rather odd examples as proof.
Way to miss the entire point of the article. It’s not anti 7-11, it’s against underinvestment in local properties and lack of reasonable planning, driven by distant ownership.
I can also walk to a convenience store, in fact I’m fairly lucky with the amenities available in my neighborhood, but many places I’ve been (and previously lived) are disorganized and lack the livability of communities where the buildings have primarily local owners.
Point is: I enjoy my neighborhood 7-11 without caring about how it looks, who owns it, or worrying about all the capitalism trade-offs.
It's just a 7-11. The charm is the walk and the experience.
You seem really stuck on 7-11. The article is not about 7-11. That’s just the example the author used, and honestly the author could have picked a better one. Just imagine that they picked vape shops or something instead.
I have lived in places where you can’t walk anywhere useful because the absentee owners didn’t want to invest in finding good tenants. The buildings were fine, but partially empty, and there was even a shortage of local office space, so they could have rented at a premium with just a little bit of investment.
7-11's, which I frequent often, need a slightly higher food quality selection to appease affluents like me, but as far as how they look, that's what a 7-11 looks like! It's what I look for when I'm driving, on "stroads" / highways, and am looking for an exactly predictable experience, one which is low-key, inexpensive, and does not imply a formal dress code. I'd never want a 7-11 to look like a brownstone in the west village, that would imply an entirely different kind of business establishment.
This does seem like a fair criticism, the 7-11 style seems fine to me. (The food selection is much better in Japanese 7-11s, though.) When I see them they are usually in better shape than other nearby stations.
Small touches such as landscaping can really make a difference. For example, 7-11s at the beach often seem to put in a little more effort, although I don’t know if that’s the store or the landlord.
yes japanese 7-11s are exactly what i had in mind. a 7-11 that also has good quality sushi to go would be amazing. it's commonplace in bodegas in NYC (more the Asian owned ones) for example. that and, just one actual dark chocolate selection amidst the piles of low-quality milk chocolate M&Ms and hershey products. it's not a big ask.
Good news for you then, they are trying to increase the food quality to be closer to the Japanese stores: https://www.tastingtable.com/2216099/7-eleven-major-changes-...
The decline of the classic US fast food restaurants (McD's, Wendy's, BK) has been matched by gas station food getting better and better. The 7-11 breakfast sandwiches are pretty good these days and sometimes the hamburgers even taste like real meat :) .
Bogle (Mr Vanguard himself) saw this coming and warned us, but it was perhaps too late: https://ia601506.us.archive.org/26/items/bogle-managerial-ca...
The linked letter has absolutely nothing to do with TFA other than a very tenuous link to Vanguard: It was written a founder who hasn't been in charge of Vanguard for several decades.
I mean, to be fair, local owners of buildings also neglect them sometimes.
So, even if this is a problem, fixing it doesn't immediately make neighborhoods beautiful.
Interesting, but I kind of like the building :)
This is a stupid article. "Sad" is not an objective criterion. Is IKEA furniture sad? I think the author would say so.
I _love_ the pictured 7-Elevens, especially the one in Austin, TX. They are perfectly functional: you drop in, get whatever items you need, and get out in seconds. Everything is designed to help you with that.
The parking lot is a necessity for convenience stores because you likely won't invest 30-40 minutes of your time to _walk_ to a convenience store. You might as well just walk to a full-blown store. The exceptions are, of course, "food deserts" where the density death spiral has hit the bottom and made the city unliveable (see: Manhattan, Tokyo).
The places like "Captains Row" are beautiful to look at but hellish to actually _live_ in. Ask me how I know. They are the equivalent of the restored classic cars: beautiful to look at, but unsafe and uncomfortable for actual use compared to modern cars.
Absentee owners should be taxed out of existence. The distance between an investment and the people who understand it is a law enforcement liability (it encourages fraud), a public liability (it inevitably concentrates ownership who can easily lobby and get bailouts), and leads to missed opportunities and inefficient use.
The mass US real estate fraud that ended in 2008 was entirely built around loaning money to people who weren't creditworthy for overvalued property that they had no expertise to judge, then immediately selling that loan to somebody who would hide it in a complex product and immediately sell it again. Eventually, these was sold to municipalities and pension funds in complex gambling vehicles whose value would fall to zero if anything went wrong in this structure, after being branded "AAA" by institutions 1) paid by the people selling the products, and 2) literally written into legislation by name and into the rules governing the pension funds.
That's what distance between an investor and in investment gets you. Tax every single hop. Make them break themselves up.
edit: Yes it does. Tax them. These transactions cost the public more than direct transactions. I know that people feel like they're far beyond having to justify a tax other than "I like it, so don't tax it," but this distance in and of itself imposes costs to the public. If you dump money into Vanguard, and Vanguard then invests in an index, Vanguard gets taxed and you get taxed, too. Poof, no more Vanguard. The horrible outcome of that is that people understand the stocks they're investing in, and that the stock market becomes a repository of intelligence - which is what I thought was supposed to justify it.
Nobody cares about justice, though. They're libertarians when they're rich and revolutionaries when they're poor. Government to protect my stuff when I have stuff, government that gives me stuff when I don't have stuff.
I assume that proposal extends to all sorts of investment (e.g. general business stocks) and isn't scoped to real-estate alone?