I've gotten a lot of little tidbits from my boss that are interesting, but I just learned something that blows all that out of the water and reframes everything.
The store I work in, a convenience store/pharmacy of medium size in a spot somewhere between the suburbs and the city, pays $50k a month in rent.
Think about how much more you're charged for products than they cost to produce. Set aside the actual Capitalists in the process, they at least facilitate production. Think about how much extra money you've been spending just so that retailers can meet the demands of some company that has a piece of paper that says they own the land.
Apparently in big cities, the rent can get over $200k a month.
Real estate is the largest sector in the US and it is entirely based on non-productive forces: rent and speculation.
Aka Someone showed up and killed the people who live here and now they can extort everyone else for eternity.
Pretty much yeah. The speculation has its roots in manifest destiny
Or how much trash ships with supposedly green brands, what the wholesale to retail markup is vs the production to wholesale market where a lot of price inflation (depending on the product of course) actually begins.
The whole notion of ecologically or socially responsible brands is mostly propaganda.
Speaking of waste, when I temped at a Marriott as a dishwasher, I saw that they threw away an ungodly amount of food every single day. Probably 5-10 lbs of bacon alone.
Oh yeah and catering companies for big events can be even worse percentage wise.
Counting the bank deposit every night at the store I worked at - roughly a third of our day's take, and simultaneously 3x enough to cover payroll for two weeks - was what taught me the labor theory of value well before I knew anything about Marx :marx-joker:
FUCK LANDLORDS :matt-jokerfied: FUCK LANDLORDS :matt-jokerfied: FUCK LANDLORDS :matt-jokerfied: FUCK LANDLORDS :matt-jokerfied: FUCK LANDLORDS :matt-jokerfied:
$600k a year in rent; what do you suppose their gross annual revenue is?
According to my boss, the store makes 3 cents on every dollar in profit.
I'll have to see if I can get him to show me the binder again.
From what I understand that is generally accurate of grocery stores
We're a block away from a proper supermarket. I'd love to see what their numbers look like.
I worked in a small boujie grocery store after lock downs began lifting in a mid sized city and we made around the low end of $100k a day
Quick googling shows a large Walmart can make up to $250k a day
Half your sales are gonna be from whales. For 5 people buying 100 bucks of like, bananas and lentils, there's someone buying 500 bucks of processed foods, protein powder, and organic eggs.
If you work in sales, like Nordstrom, every like 10th person will pretty much buy whatever you point them at no matter how shifty and expensive it is.
So it's not 2500 customers. It's 1250 customers, a few of whom literally can't stop themselves.
This is what it felt like ringing up at my old grocery store. Many customers spent around $70-200 and a fair amount would have these huge haul $300/$400/$500+ purchases
We sold nice alcohol and that ran up bills very quickly
My old store would peak at $300k+ in the weekends and shopping days leading up to holidays. Average customer hauls being over $100.
$250k for average is wild
At the height of covid the store I worked in made 1 million every two days, I was sitting nearby and managed to hear the store manager whisper that to my department manager
She also told them it was the best they've done since 9/11
So even at a conservative estimate of earnings, the store is paying less than 3% of its revenue in rent.
Wait no sorry, I'm not op, I was just providing my own example, the company in my case owned the building and the plot of land, but utilities and taxes probably didn't exceed 5%
I know, I was saying that based on a factor of 4 from "200k a month".
From what I remember, one of the reasons why rent is skyrocketing in Copenhagen (aside from general shittyness of financialization and the centralization of state ressources) is that we actually do have some modicum of rent control in certain counties, but those only apply to residential buildings, and since the county can't really expand anymore, since Copenhagen is flanked by the sea to the south and east, landlords are closing down residential buildings and redeveloping them into "office spaces" where they can charge insane amounts of rent. Then, people are forced to move to the western and northern edges of the city, where, surprise surprise, there are no rent controls, because for some fucking reason rent control is decided at the county level and is left to each individual county, despite Denmark being an extremely centralized state.
Wtf the county level? Denmark is literally smaller than some US counties
Oh yeah, we used to have something like 200 different counties, which meant that almost every little farmer village got to be their own administrative unit. This made everything extremely difficult and so the government in 2004 decided to reduce it to a more manageable 97. Even funnier is that something like 15% of the entire population lives in the county of Copenhagen (something like 600k people) and the greater copenhagen area taking up 1.3 million people living in 18 different counties, which means there is copenhagen and then 17 counties that hate copenhagen.
If Denmark was a US county, it would be the 5th largest county in the US (assuming that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_counties_in_the_United_States_by_area doesnt include Alaska) So great news, we aren't THAT tiny. Though it is extremely funny that all the big county areas in the US are just desert areas that nobody can live in anymore. No idea what their population was before the whites showed up though.
Lincoln County, Nevada
Area:
10,637 sq mi (27,550 km2)
Population (2020):
4,499
Density: 0.42/sq mi (0.16/km2)
Empty ass country
If Denmark had the same population density it would only have around 6,800 people (idk what the metric measurement for people is)
idk what the metric measurement for people is
There’s a joke about imperial vs metric and the three fifths compromise in here somewhere
I love rational systems populated by rational actors producing rational outcomes! The system works!
$20-35 per square foot is usually where attached retail space is at. I’ve seen $50/sqft for a place attached to a Whole Foods. And for retail space the rent explicitly doesn’t cover maintenance. There’s an additional CAM charge (common area maintenance) that gets tacked on annually to cover maintaining the property and things like HVAC are the responsibility of the business renting the space. Even small business tyrants want to execute the landlords
I know someone who used to work in restaurants and said that each year rent was going up, even though there's literally only so much they can raise prices or serve more people. It'll eventually just shut places down
Rents are twofold in some instances. There was a company I worked for that paid something like $50,000/month in rent to another LLC owned by the same owner. So whenever raises were discussed, rent would increase and the profits would suddenly "disappear"
Also allows companies to shift money around between LLCs and evade different taxes.
