Comment by carapace
5 years ago
There's a family-run bakery near my house that specializes in cheesecakes. They make the best cheesecakes I've ever tasted. They only make a certain number (~200, say, I dunno really) per day, they always sell out, then they close for the day. Every year they take a two-month vacation. That's it. That's the whole business.
Anthony Mangieri was downtown for a few years here in SF before he went back East. https://www.unapizza.com/about I got to eat there one time. Sublime. Unbelievable. All he does all day every day is pizza.
Something like that (and a good accountant) and you're set for life, eh?
That’s the truth - and it’s a good life, too. Easy to sleep at night, at least.
Ed: man, I had that pizza too - it was hyped to the roof and I didn’t want to admit it, but damned if that wasn’t the best pizza in the city...
> sell out, then they close for the day. Every year they take a two-month vacation.
What is stopping their landlord from raising the rent, since they obviously have money to spare?
Principles? Morals? Ethics?
The small things preventing humanity from murdering, raping, enslaving, and torturing one another. It's easy to forget that these exist and that everyone must always be on guard, defending the world against ones own baser instincts and defending oneself against humanity at larges baser instincts. As we collectively forget, or consciously ignore, our duty to one another we mortgage humanities future with collective suffering today. Eventually the bill on these ills come due, one way or another the sociological debt is always repaid.
Indeed. That's why I'm worried when I see interpersonal relations being replaced by market rules. Markets have no morals, principles and ethics by default, and generally consider these factors to be inefficiencies.
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> The small things preventing humanity from murdering, raping, enslaving, and torturing one another
nothing, except for the threat of punishment from the law - which mostly works.
Why do you think in a country where the law enforcement failed (such as a failed state) breaks down in to chaos so easily? Where's the "Principles, Morals, Ethics" then?
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As far as I know, landlords are not known for possessing any of the qualities you list. Indeed, what is special and unusual about this situation might not be the bakery itself, but the landlord of that particular bakery. There might be thousands of such potential bakeries all over, but for the fact that the profits are extracted by the landlords, and this might be the normal state of things. We would have no way to tell.
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Real estate prices depend on the market rate, not the buyer's wealth.
Market rate depends on what the buyers will bear, on aggregate. Given that rents are sticky - it costs a lot to move yourself, and even more to move a business - the landlord could eat into a lot of their margins, if the landlord was so inclined.
Competition from other landlords