Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/25/cheesecake-factory-tells-landl.html
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The Revolution will be led by Britney Spears and the Cheesecake Factory? I did not see that coming
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So, is that form letter available for all the people to use?
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If you are AirBnB-ing your entire city you have to use twitter
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It won’t be considered if submitted by human persons; only letters from corporate people have a chance of not ending up in a landlord’s round file.
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$2BILLION in annual revenue and they can’t afford to pay rent for a month?
Somebody has been paying too much for dictionary sized menus.
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something something something “too big to fail” something something something
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And in the UK, hugely-profitable and reactionary-owned pub chain Wetherspoons apparently laid off all the workers without severance and then told its suppliers it wouldn’t be paying them either…
The independent restaurants, bars and cafes will shut down because of a lack of revenue, and the giant chains that can afford to weather the situation are just going to screw everyone else to do so (or just to keep their profits up).
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I believe the technical term is leveraged up to their eyeballs.
A lot of these big businesses are used by holding firms to extract loans to invest in buying more businesses. Of course the same is true of real estate.
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Well, had, that’s gone now. Their costs are about 2 billion a year, some of that they will not incur because it represents consumables, and some are wages, but still no cash flow. The deal they’re offering their landlords is essentially “do you want to try to find a tenant for an empty restaurant” or do you want to lose rent a month or two (or four, but these guys are all Trumpists, so, two weeks AmIRight?). Renting an empty location would likely take longer and involve other costs. Not a bad offer to make. If landlords are property owners they can probably do it, if they are intermediates that’s another story.
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It’s like that scene from the end of Rent where everyone is singing about how they’re not going to pay their rent this year, except instead of working class people it’s billion-dollar corporation.
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$2bn in annual revenues
I’m searching earnestly for fu@ks, ain’t found any for Cheesecake Factory.
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Sadly, because there were and still are no guidelines from the federal or state governments putting a uniform pause on the country’s economy, a lot of landlords are going to try to extract back rent in several months when they think they could conceivably evict the existing tenants and shop for new tenants. It’ll be chaos, and the economic fallout will be felt throughout the rest of the economy. In short, the economy is going to to what the economy is going to do, but because of the absence of effective decisive leadership it will be haphazard and therefore worse. And the Cult of Trump will blame everyone except the people making the decisions.
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Bet on it, it’s the calm before the storm. The TGOP finger wagging will be tremendous.
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And a lot of these properties are held in expectation of increase in land value in the first place, with landlords setting rents high enough to just enable the business to operate until they want to capitalize on the real estate. Of course, probably no market for that in the near future, unless you have prime prison land 
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Push that soul patch up under his nose and it’d be better.
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What this exposes is the incredibly shaky foundation many corporations are built upon. Instead of building up cash reserves during profit years in order to weather the inevitable storm, they instead pursue stock buybacks and generous management bonus plans that do nothing to further the actual business.
I say good riddance to these parasitic institutions. Live by the capitalism sword, die by it as well.
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Too big to pull up by their own bootstraps, but it’s totally possible for the servers who will be out of a job. They should have had six months wages in savings.
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Owe Your Banker £1,000 and You Are at His Mercy; Owe Him £1 Million and the Position Is Reversed.
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