(rental) houses are losing color because they have to design it in the least offensive way. Better be "acceptable" for 1000 people than "beautiful" for 10.
That mcDonalds is also a prime example. That building can be used for anything now. The old McDonald's building is specifically a McDonald's or some sort of "fun" eating establishment. If the McDonald's leaves the building, the "boring" one will be worth more/ can extract more rent.
That said, the article is good at highlighting a huge cultural trend. Resale value might be only partially a driver of it. A lot of my monochromatic purchases will never be resold to anyone.
This kind of blanket statement is almost always wrong about anything in the messy real world.
But it's especially wrong in this case. McDonald's is effectively a real estate company[0] that has been growing over ~80 years.
[0] https://thestrategystory.com/2020/09/24/mcdonalds-real-estat...
I don't think this contradicts the contention that McDonald's is too short-term in its thinking to be worried about resale value.
Yes, they're a real estate company. But most of that real estate is never sold or rented to anyone other than McDonald's franchisees.
I think they designed the stores this way because they believe -- and probably have troves of data to support them -- that this style of architecture is better for their restaurants too.
It's not credible that a corporation that grows from one restaurant into world dominance is guilty of "short-term" thinking.
Short term thinking leads to a crashing stock value, followed by bankruptcy.
Investors don't want that.
If I do something today, and the corporation benefits in 10 years, I don't get the credit for that. Whoever has my role in 10 years gets the credit.
I completely agree that corporations SHOULD think long-term. But I fail to see much evidence of that.
If you want to argue that Ray Kroc had a long-term vision, you'd probably be right. But I very much doubt today's management thinks that far out.
Every large company on the stock exchange is evidence of that.
> are you really arguing corporations aren't driven by quarterly and annual results?
Have you ever seen companies beat their quarterly earnings estimates, and yet their stock drops? That's because the shareholders were suspicious that those results were short term, and the long term outlook didn't look so hot.
Any shareholder that is suspicious that a corporation has sacrificed the long term for short term profits, is going to dump that stock. Wouldn't you?
Dividends are not a sign of short term investing. When the company's profits decline from short term thinking, the dividends disappear.
BTW, if you identify a company that is short-terming, and the other investors haven't caught on and tanked the stock, you can make a mint by shorting the stock. Got any success stories at that? Have you made money shorting McDonald's?
This is a commonly repeated trope that is just wrong. Corporations are very forward looking. Consider the price earnings ratio of the S&P500. It's been on a general upward trend since the 80s, only disrupted by recessions and stock market crashes [0]. That means stock holders are willing to invest more money for future earnings. Discount rates are also very low historically which means future earnings are discounted at a lower rate.
Similarly the number of companies that earn no profit is very high:
> Of the largest 1,500 companies by market capitalization today, around 200 weren’t profitable during any of the last three years. But instead of punishing them, investors have rewarded them with a total market value of more than $2.3 trillion. Wall Street hasn’t been willing to attach such high market values to unprofitable companies since the late 1990s (and even then, the total market valuation of the unprofitable companies wasn’t even half of what it is now). [1]
Private R&D spending is also on an upward trend since the 50s as a percentage of GDP, displacing much of federal spending in R&D. [2]
Everywhere you look you'll see long term thinking is rewarded. The only place you hear complaints about "short term profit" is corporate managers that want cover for bad results. They can always say they're "investing for the future" and their investments will take a decade to pan out, but conveniently they won't be around by then.
I doubt you can find any Excel valuation template that's used in business school that does not include resale value. You can bet the people in charge of purchasing McDonald's real estate look very closely at resale value.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclically_adjusted_price-to-e...
[1] https://money.com/stock-market-companies-no-profits/
[2] https://cglife.com/blog/recent-trends-in-rd-spending-the-lan...
Please stop posting this. It only makes Marx's falling rate of profit[1] look correct.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_prof...
What exactly are we supposed to be gaining by burying our heads in the sand and refusing to talk about high-valuation unprofitable companies?
You could say, 'Ive always thought' or 'I have evidence that demonstrates that your point isn't totally correct' or something that respects the original poster a bit more than outward dismissal.
It's not even a long-term vs short-term thing.
The boring building increases your capitalization as a holding more, allowing you to financialize it more.
The breakfast menu has been cancelled here though since Corona and never returned :'( I miss my sausage and egg muffin.
In America, Covid killed the "all day breakfast," which is a shame. Sausage and egg muffin is better than all their lunch/dinner food.
So now it's the regular menu all day. Big mac for breakfast? Hmmm. No.
In fact I've never seen all-day breakfast at any McDonald's in Europe and I've traveled a lot for work (so a lot of hit & run breakfasts at airports)
I always wondered how they get the eggs so round but one time I saw them make them.. They fry the egg on the burger plate but in a metal ring. Cool idea.
My friend grew up with a hatred for apples because her school cafeteria served only Red Delicious.
Best apple I ever had was a Pippin.
I know I report my car's paint color to the DMV when I registered it. (Paint colors are also encoded in many manufacturers' VINs, I believe.) It would be neat to make some kind of visualization of car paint color popularity over time using DMV data.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car...
The vast majority of the vehicles are ordered in colors that will sell. Some auto companies assign vehicles to dealers, others let the dealer pick the options on the ones they're getting, and the dealers know what will sell (and upsell).
You wish. The situation is slowly improving but I had to wait 6 weeks for a car earlier this summer that was "in transit" (which I guess was to say it existed in the manufacturer's database someplace). This wasn't even a build to order vehicle. I suspect that would have been months.
I'm not sure where computational power enters into it. It's just that dealers want to mostly have cars on their lot which are acceptable to the greatest number of buyers who want/need a car right now which the model in hot pink isn't going to be for a lot of people.
An allegory.[1]
................
A random finds a fifty-dollar bill on the streets, exclaims, "Oh I'll go to a restaurant!" She gets there and is like "OK that chicken á la" squints "no not the French...the Adobe uh..." then waiter says "Adobado. That'll be $23.99." "Up front? Wait wai--" "Need the money to go buy the ingredients in the first place!"
.................
Yeah so they gotta mask that.
[1] Not claiming I'm any special anything, sticking to the true story I'm a slave of GOD, but that's irrelevant, anybody can say allegories. Maybe the parables are the ones that are for prophets only...maybe I'm thinking of that. Oh well. Best I can do. Used every other literary device by this point, in my attempt of elevating hn posts to an art form.
i think it's further up the chain than the dealership. when i've taken a look, most of the manufacturer colors were fairly neutral. there might be blues and reds, but they're muted. the dealership couldn't buy something bright unless they're selling kawasaki motorcycles.
Which is why you only find "reused iconic buildings" in parts of the city that are now more run-down.
This isn't true at all - city centres often have protection for their historic iconic buildings. In somewhere like central London the majority of buildings are reused iconic buildings. You'll find McDonalds locations in Georgian town-houses for example.
In your example, the McDonalds had to make do with the existing building which they aren't allowed to change. In the other example, non-McDonalds have to make do with an un-renovated McDonalds structure which they can't afford to change. You aren't providing a counter example, you're just talking about something different.
Things as documented by: https://twitter.com/utbaph?lang=en
A McDonalds that is built into Westminster Abbey may be part of an iconic building, but the McDonalds isn't Iconic (nor is the one on the Champs-Élysées).
Or, even, you don't have to! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_McDonald%27s_restaurant "Along with its sign, it was deemed eligible for addition to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, although it was not added because the owner objected"
I'd frame it alternatively: optimization incentivizes uniformity. Inefficiencies are ruthlessly filtered out of the system. A wacky color scheme reduces might reduce profits by x%, so all fast food restaurants will tend towards the same boxy boring structure.
Another example of this for me is sports. Take baseball for example: in the past, you had so many different styles of players. Pitchers had unique and funky delivery types. It gave the game character. Now? If you're not optimizing your style of play to deliver the highest value according to the stats, you're costing yourself tens of millions of dollars. All the character of the game is slowly being wrung out.
This pattern is obviously being played across every domain in every part of life. It's pretty sad but entirely rational from every individual actor's point of view. And furthermore, it seems like an issue that's impossible to fix in a world of infinite information.
SSC's Meditations on Moloch is one of the best (and longest) essays I've read on this maximization issue.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
https://www.worldanvil.com/w/parastellis/a/multipolar-trap-a...
https://thestrategystory.com/2020/09/24/mcdonalds-real-estat...
Ironically, one of the places where you can reliably find colourful stuff is Ikea, which commoditised furniture and household items in general.