u/Mundane-Manner4237

McDonald's is a burger chain that doubles as one of the world's largest landlords. The company collects more than $10 billion in annual rent from its franchisees. It owns the buildings of roughly 80% of its 45,000-plus restaurants and the land under about 56% of them.
Interesting article touching upon McD‘s business model, with real estate holdings estimated at ~$120 billion. Via the MotleyFool, unfortunately linked through the Yahoo Finance site (if you think McDonalds is bad, Yahoo is the dysfunctional armpit of the internet).

Nothing new here, but they understand those with low income (poor folk) are running out of that extra cash to patronize McD. It’s not unique to MickeyD, these higher gas prices combined with customer squeeze is becoming interesting for a broad variety of businesses and the economy. Oh, the fun little game.

Personally, I go there every so often and have a saltless McDouble or McCrispy Deluxe, fries and a Dr Pepper, no ice. I use the app and/or the survey discounts. I usually spend ~$8, don’t get/need a soda refill and I’m not angry about it.

I’m mildly curious about the McD business model and always amazed at the dichotomy of reactions about anything related to McDonalds.

Day Manager at Ballinger Way NE. Shoreline Wa. location. Yesterday there was a guy in front of me at cash register with a big, unleashed pit bull which was kind of running around. Needless to say, I kept my distance.

Manager patiently spent about 5 minutes, took the dudes confused order and mentioned that the dog shouldn’t be in the restaurant especially as it was unleashed. Dog owner started to get belligerent with cursing and threats. Manager (who was kind of a big guy) offered to cancel order and provide refund or told the guy he could wait outside for his order. Situation got palpably heated and made everyone nervous but I have to say manager deescalated effectively. Personally, I would have called police-it was that bad.

Made me think it’s a mostly tough, thankless job. He was cool though as he saw I was being patient during the showdown. I told him he handled it well and gave me a free sandwich coupon. Tells you how fast things can go sideways and you don’t really know what people are capable of these days.

Man, think of the paid employee hours they are saving by avoiding cash transactions/cashiers. I mean they do 77,000,000 transactions a day. If each transaction takes 1 minute thats over 1.2 million hours of having to pay an employee each day. No wonder they love you using that app, that saves millions of more man hours.

It’s odd because there seems to be no way to do this without paying using your credit card. I’d like to use my points or get an app exclusive deal and pay in cash. They keep telling me I can’t do this. I can however use a code to get points for my order using the drive thru and then pay cash. Maybe it’s just this particular McDs or I think they really just want to eliminate using cash.

For context I’m in my early sixties and have been playing guitar for almost 50 years (I can’t believe I just wrote that-gulp). I’ve been lucky enough to have/had some nice amps along the way which I’ve played in a lot of bands. I have a great, useful little family of late/mid seventies Silverface Fenders that I carefully and patiently acquired over the years which includes: an ‘80 Deluxe Reverb, a ‘79 Princeton Reverb and a ‘78 Champ. One for every situation.

The Champ I got my first month at college in ‘82 that was listed in the little university paper for…….$40.00, forty four years ago. I ran over to another dorm and was really happy to get it. I have to say, it’s been bullet proof all these years (many hundreds of hours of playing time, no joke). I’ve only needed to change the power tube out once or twice and I’ve used and pushed the shit out of this thing. I did put a fantastic 20 watt 8A125 Weber speaker (I talked to and bought it from Ted himself RIP) in it and set the original aside for safe keeping. For my playing, I love how it’s voiced and works really well for the low volume level band I’m in now. I’ve used this amp the most of all of them by far and have it mic’d if needed in a live situation. It would be great for it to have spring reverb but a Holy Grail pedal does the trick. Will be using it with my Original Collection Vintage Cherry Les Paul Special for a gig on June 6th. Cheers

https://preview.redd.it/mtevgoggqdzg1.jpg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8471117b168f10d9fc0ddf8e393d2b3013c61d4a