4 ms·

You probably own this 7-Eleven (and that's why it looks so sad)

79 points by iamnothere 1mo ago

jmclnx 1mo ago
Interesting, but I kind of like the building :)
bombcar 1mo ago
Bogle (Mr Vanguard himself) saw this coming and warned us, but it was perhaps too late: https://ia601506.us.archive.org/26/items/bogle-managerial-capitalism/Bogle-managerial-capitalism.pdf https://ia601506.us.archive.org/26/items/bogle-managerial-ca...
- happyopossum 1mo ago
  The linked letter has absolutely nothing to do with TFA other than a very tenuous link to Vanguard: It was written a founder who hasn't been in charge of Vanguard for several decades.
FLeXMurphy 1mo ago
Ah, perfect. A patronizing tone to start off the article. Where have I seen this before?
- jafo1989 1mo ago
  As a frequent walker to the 7-11 in my "soul-crushing suburban district", I decided to look up the 7-11 landscape in Williamsburg, Virginia using the satellite view in Google Maps. Every single one of them is walkable from residential property. My guess is the author lives in a densely populated urban area, and doesn't understand how "soul-crushing suburban districts" really work. I've been walking to my 7-11 for over 30 years, and have gotten to know many attendants over the years.
  - iamnothere 1mo ago
    Way to miss the entire point of the article. It’s not anti 7-11, it’s against underinvestment in local properties and lack of reasonable planning, driven by distant ownership. I can also walk to a convenience store, in fact I’m fairly lucky with the amenities available in my neighborhood, but many places I’ve been (and previously lived) are disorganized and lack the livability of communities where the buildings have primarily local owners.
    - jafo1989 1mo ago
      Point is: I enjoy my neighborhood 7-11 without caring about how it looks, who owns it, or worrying about all the capitalism trade-offs. It's just a 7-11. The charm is the walk and the experience.
      - iamnothere 1mo ago
        You seem really stuck on 7-11. The article is not about 7-11. That’s just the example the author used, and honestly the author could have picked a better one. Just imagine that they picked vape shops or something instead. I have lived in places where you can’t walk anywhere useful because the absentee owners didn’t want to invest in finding good tenants. The buildings were fine, but partially empty, and there was even a shortage of local office space, so they could have rented at a premium with just a little bit of investment.
        deleted 1mo ago
        [deleted]
        jafo1989 1mo ago
        They are stores. You go to them and buy stuff you need, and then leave. If you don't have good stores near you, you move to another place that does. Is life really that complicated?
        iamnothere 1mo ago
schnevets 1mo ago
So Vanguard owns one-eighth of ADC, an REIT whose stock price has declined 2.65% in the last 5 years. Surely there is space in the market for a smaller, leaner, possibly privately-owned REIT whose values more closely align with 2026 values and will one day be able to eat ADC's lunch.
- iamnothere 1mo ago
  CRE is a tough market right now, but you would think that a little bit of minimal creativity and effort could make an impact. I get annoyed with the overreliance on murals to provide faux authenticity, but even that is usually better than a bland box.
- sidewndr46 1mo ago
  I think the tax incentives of an REIT pretty much mandate it be publicly traded?
- mixdup 1mo ago
  only a 2.65% decline in a commercial real estate REIT is probably beating the market
- Analemma_ 1mo ago
  Commercial real estate got walloped by covid and the damage is still making its way through the system. A 2.65% decline in the last 5 years is probably one of the better performers in the sector.
spicyusername 1mo ago
I mean, to be fair, local owners of buildings also neglect them sometimes. So, even if this is a problem, fixing it doesn't immediately make neighborhoods beautiful.
rootsudo 1mo ago
On the flip side: your retirement is dependent on the property listed in the article and if no improvements are needed while it generates a return… It means you’re a landlord! Congratulations!! Give yourself a round of applause. By not maintaining it, you are electing to keep cash flow high and profits secured. The overall commercial market has negative numbers so even if said REIT is down 2.65% it’s hedged together with numerous properties in a nice geographic arbitrage opportunity to minimize losses. Is that really… So bad?
- SoftTalker 1mo ago
  A common saying is that in real estate, you make your money when you buy and when you sell, in other words not paying too much and timing sales to profit from appreciation. Cash flow from rent isn't a big part of it, that normally covers taxes, insurance, debt servicing, and maintenance but not a whole lot more.
  - rootsudo 1mo ago
    Well, it depends, if you’re going for ARV and appreciation, cash flow helps a lot on holding costs. While I agree with you make money when you buy/biggerpockets quotes, you want cash flow to minimize holding costs.
  - senordevnyc 1mo ago
    I've been investing in real estate for decades now, and the version I've always heard is that you make your money when you buy, NOT when you sell. Also, other than flippers, the vast majority of real estate investors I'm familiar with are very focused on buying cashflow, and prefer never to sell. It might be different for REITs focused on CRE, I'm not as familiar with that space, but my impression has always been that the biggest and most successful investors are buying and holding, not trading.
    - SoftTalker 1mo ago
      Sure, if you're buying in an appreciating area, and the rent covers the carrying costs, you hang on to the property as long as you can or as long as the property is a still a good fit in your diversification plan. I would agree that not overpaying is probably the most important thing.
nemomarx 1mo ago
I want to see what the author considers a nice 7-11 for contrast, because it seems normal to me? Could be more walkable of course but I'm not sure that's on the REIT. They didn't lay out the roads or anything. The wood paneling and nice front lights actually seem like an improvement over local 7-11s if anything.
- sroussey 1mo ago
  Yeah, I was thinking the same — this one looks nicer than the ones near me.
askafriend 1mo ago
It looks like a normal 7-Eleven.
ddj231 1mo ago
seems like aesthetically it matches its surroundings. it doesn't seem like an outlier in the neighborhood which kind of defeats the premise of the article.
Ozzie_osman 1mo ago
In systems thinking, this would be called "intrinsic responsibility" (or lack thereof). > Intrinsic responsibility” means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision making directly and quickly and compellingly to the decision makers. Because the pilot of a plane rides in the front of the plane, that pilot is intrinsically responsible. He or she will experience directly the consequences of his or her decisions. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12139955-intrinsic-responsibility-means-that-the-system-is-designed-to-send https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12139955-intrinsic-responsi...
- skybrian 1mo ago
  How does that work, though? In the early days, pilots were daredevils. It doesn’t seem like aviation became safer because pilots took risks? Workspace safety didn’t improve by blaming the workers, even though they bore the risk.
  - snackbroken 1mo ago
    Workplace safety improved massively when labor unions became a thing and workers got a say in safety standards.
  - roarcher 1mo ago
    The workers were not the decision makers.
  - HawtAds 1mo ago
    > It doesn’t seem like aviation became safer because pilots took risks That's pretty much the job of test pilots even today. They are usually dual trained pilots and engineers/technicians, and their job is basically to QA new planes. In military aviation especially test pilots are often feeders into the astronaut program (a different but similar type of daredevil).
  - Krutonium 1mo ago
    On the contrary, rules and regulations are written in blood, and airplanes are manufactured stronger in different ways because pilots took risks. The Wings don't shear off when the pilot yanks the yoke left and up because someone did before, and the Wings either fell off or didn't - but until it happened, the wings were an unknown quantity. And that's just one example. That's basically the job description of a Test Pilot.
sodality2 1mo ago
This was my home gas station for 4 years so I may be biased, but it is fine. Symptomatic of a deeper car-centric problem, sure.
- yowayb 1mo ago
  I have fond high school memories at gas stations
  - SoftTalker 1mo ago
    Younger than that for me. As kids in elementary school my friends and I used to ride our bikes to the gas station at the entrance to our subdivision. They only had like one rack of candy bars and a soda vending machine, but for a 10 year old with some change in his pocket that was great. This was the mid-1970s. There was a larger "convenience store" at the other end of the next subdivision, you could bike to it but it was a few miles so we went there less often. They had a lot more snack choices though, and you could get a glimpse of the covers of the Playboy magazines that were on the shelf behind the counter.
trgn 1mo ago
the commodification of everything, just one more example. once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
- bittercynic 1mo ago
  I think we're in agreement that commodification is often harmful, and should be constrained more than it currently is. It seems many of our fellow commenters are pretty enthusiastic about turning everything into a financial asset, though.
HawtAds 1mo ago
No, this is just poor management. Japanese 7-11s are ran better because of better culture, products and management. It's not magic.
- Transformanshen 1mo ago
  I tend to agree with you
- etdznots 1mo ago
  They have a different culture and values, the US’s strengths lie in individualism and the character of the individuals that live here, and that’s both good and bad. But it’s entirely unsurprising that when responsibility and ownership is sharded up into trillions of tiny pieces and diffused that the outcome is awful.
- loco5niner 1mo ago
  I'm certainly a fan of Japanese products. They are high-quality, etc. And everything was clean and orderly and amazing as a short-term visitor over 20 years ago. I would not be quick to say it is a better culture though, I suspect some negative are quite hidden, and lurking underneath the cultural norms. Again, as an outsider, I have lots of positive thoughts about Japanese culture.
zzzeek 1mo ago
7-11's, which I frequent often, need a slightly higher food quality selection to appease affluents like me, but as far as how they look, that's what a 7-11 looks like! It's what I look for when I'm driving, on "stroads" / highways, and am looking for an exactly predictable experience, one which is low-key, inexpensive, and does not imply a formal dress code. I'd never want a 7-11 to look like a brownstone in the west village, that would imply an entirely different kind of business establishment.
- iamnothere 1mo ago
  This does seem like a fair criticism, the 7-11 style seems fine to me. (The food selection is much better in Japanese 7-11s, though.) When I see them they are usually in better shape than other nearby stations. Small touches such as landscaping can really make a difference. For example, 7-11s at the beach often seem to put in a little more effort, although I don’t know if that’s the store or the landlord.
  - zzzeek 1mo ago
    yes japanese 7-11s are exactly what i had in mind. a 7-11 that also has good quality sushi to go would be amazing. it's commonplace in bodegas in NYC (more the Asian owned ones) for example. that and, just one actual dark chocolate selection amidst the piles of low-quality milk chocolate M&Ms and hershey products. it's not a big ask.
    - stryan 1mo ago
      Good news for you then, they are trying to increase the food quality to be closer to the Japanese stores: https://www.tastingtable.com/2216099/7-eleven-major-changes-better-food-options/ https://www.tastingtable.com/2216099/7-eleven-major-changes-... The decline of the classic US fast food restaurants (McD's, Wendy's, BK) has been matched by gas station food getting better and better. The 7-11 breakfast sandwiches are pretty good these days and sometimes the hamburgers even taste like real meat :) .
Terr_ 1mo ago
By that logic, I also own a microscopic share in all sorts of businesses, many of which have their own sadness or disinterest. Is there anything that makes real-estate significantly different, beyond how the pathos can be more-easily photographed? In other words, I expect the (legitimate) issues raised in the article have close analogues in legal/financial/incentive problems for other forms of investment. > The shortcoming of such analyses is that they make it difficult to capture the value that would accrue to a project that created a neighborhood. Sounds like an opportunity for experts in the field to develop and sell a good kind of analysis! Though point-taken: It'd still be hard to attract cautious investors until something is perceived as "proven".
pessimizer 1mo ago
Absentee owners should be taxed out of existence. The distance between an investment and the people who understand it is a law enforcement liability (it encourages fraud), a public liability (it inevitably concentrates ownership who can easily lobby and get bailouts), and leads to missed opportunities and inefficient use. The mass US real estate fraud that ended in 2008 was entirely built around loaning money to people who weren't creditworthy for overvalued property that they had no expertise to judge, then immediately selling that loan to somebody who would hide it in a complex product and immediately sell it again. Eventually, these was sold to municipalities and pension funds in complex gambling vehicles whose value would fall to zero if anything went wrong in this structure, after being branded "AAA" by institutions 1) paid by the people selling the products, and 2) literally written into legislation by name and into the rules governing the pension funds. That's what distance between an investor and in investment gets you. Tax every single hop. Make them break themselves up. edit: Yes it does. Tax them. These transactions cost the public more than direct transactions. I know that people feel like they're far beyond having to justify a tax other than "I like it, so don't tax it," but this distance in and of itself imposes costs to the public. If you dump money into Vanguard, and Vanguard then invests in an index, Vanguard gets taxed and you get taxed, too. Poof, no more Vanguard. The horrible outcome of that is that people understand the stocks they're investing in, and that the stock market becomes a repository of intelligence - which is what I thought was supposed to justify it. Nobody cares about justice, though. They're libertarians when they're rich and revolutionaries when they're poor. Government to protect my stuff when I have stuff, government that gives me stuff when I don't have stuff.
- Terr_ 1mo ago
  I assume that proposal extends to all sorts of investment (e.g. general business stocks) and isn't scoped to real-estate alone?
skybrian 1mo ago
Zoning might be seen as a way of getting local control over property that’s actually owned by someone else, for better or worse. Developers often have to make concessions to local governments to get approval, and NIMBYism has its downsides. A local government has options like creating a historical district if they really want to control aesthetics. A home owner’s association can control aesthetics in a residential area. They are just people and you might disagree with their decisions. Real estate is expensive. Large commercial properties usually require rich owners. the local gentry that owns farms and car dealerships and shopping malls and fast-food franchises isn’t necessarily any more interested in aethetics than an REIT. It seems like land-use governance is always going to be messy no matter how it’s structured?
throwitaway222 1mo ago
I think part of the reason the US doesn't feel like the US anymore is that ownership of properties is no longer Bob who dreamed of some day opening a Pizza shop on Main st. It's all corporate now, all the way down.
- cogman10 1mo ago
  Yup. Consolidation of the markets is ultimately what's destroyed small businesses. It's currently working on the likes of dentists and vets. The US has devolved to the point where only someone with a large amount of wealth can start and run a business. You can't open up a small hardware shop anymore because no bank will give that loan and no supplier will give you the same wholesale prices they give to the likes of Home Depot or Lowes or heck even Walmart. At every level in the supply distribution system we've seen consolidation and ultimately locking out of competition. For example, here's why independent pharmacists have been going out of business [1]. We need new Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt anti-trust breakups to make capitalism work again. Capitalism can't work without a diverse competitive market. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmZtBW54GNI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmZtBW54GNI
  - MisterTea 1mo ago
    > We need new Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt anti-trust breakups to make capitalism work again. Too bad the oligarchs slowly whittled away the government immune system until it was weak enough to infect last election cycle and is busy destroying what little is left. America seems to be headed into a feudal dark age. Once the government is toothless only the people can fix it with mass protest and/or violence.
    - cogman10 1mo ago
      There were oligarchs with massive amounts of power in the days of the Roosevelts. Rockefeller, Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Vanderbilt. These were all huge oligarchs that definitely fought to try and keep America in a feudal dark age. Things seem bleak, but we've been here before and came out of it better.
cyberax 1mo ago
This is a stupid article. "Sad" is not an objective criterion. Is IKEA furniture sad? I think the author would say so. I _love_ the pictured 7-Elevens, especially the one in Austin, TX. They are perfectly functional: you drop in, get whatever items you need, and get out in seconds. Everything is designed to help you with that. The parking lot is a necessity for convenience stores because you likely won't invest 30-40 minutes of your time to _walk_ to a convenience store. You might as well just walk to a full-blown store. The exceptions are, of course, "food deserts" where the density death spiral has hit the bottom and made the city unliveable (see: Manhattan, Tokyo). The places like "Captains Row" are beautiful to look at but hellish to actually _live_ in. Ask me how I know. They are the equivalent of the restored classic cars: beautiful to look at, but unsafe and uncomfortable for actual use compared to modern cars.
bradly 1mo ago
In the past 7-Eleven was unique in the franchise world where you could make a comfortable living owning a single store and that was the major ownership model. McDonalds and other options at the time really depended on a multi-store ownership model. Corporate 7-Eleven (Southland Corp technically) moved away from this single store model in the mid to late 90's, instead preferring single, larger corporations in a region, owning 10+ stores over a single store owner. They made this happen over a 20 year span by changing the contracts franchisees sign and must to re-sign every x years. Every contract renewal drastically reduced the single store income and made it much harder for single store owners to make a living. Corporate also started preferring to give new stores to existing, large scale franchises over new store owners which changes the initial capital needed for a store by over 10x as with an existing store you will have to pay the rights from the previous franchisee instead of just the corporate. My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles all own or have owned 7-Eleven stores and have since the 80's. I've worked there, been to their conferences, and still get to hear about them at all family gatherings :)
- JackFr 1mo ago
  I don't know if it's causative, but that seems to coincide with the move from Southland Corp to being run by the Japanese parent Seven & i Holdings.
- SoftTalker 1mo ago
  McDonalds was the same early on, but evolved into a real-estate operation that also sells hamburgers. Last I knew (this was the 1990s) there were still a few single-store franchisees but most franchisees owned at least half a dozen stores in a market. I also think the investment required to buy a franchise is vastly larger than it was in the beginning. It's really only affordable to owners who can leverage the income they are making from the stores they already own. AFAIK they do still require owners to be operators. You can't own a McDonalds franchise passively. But I'm not sure that's still the case.
  - greedo 1mo ago
    Back in the 80's you still needed to have multiple stores. Otherwise your overhead from back office and maintenance stuff would just eat up too much profits. Once you hit three stores, you could start to make serious money if you ran a tight ship.
kccqzy 1mo ago
The article spends a lot of time describing problems that I would see as a result of car centricity and land use patterns, but it just fails to make a point on why it’s a problem caused by REITs. You can easily go to NYC and find entire neighborhoods owned by large absentee landlords and yet are still walkable and desirable to live in. Yes perhaps regulations and tax laws favor large firms, but in the end zoning laws can easily require those large firms to build desirable neighborhoods.
- gipp 1mo ago
  > You can easily go to NYC and find entire neighborhoods owned by large absentee landlords and yet are still walkable and desirable to live in. Sure, because they were largely built a hundred years ago, and parceled into lots a hundred more before that, and because NYC remains uniquely friendly to continued mixed-use development today.
  - kccqzy 1mo ago
    No. You can look at the recent Hudson Yards development. Largely owned by two companies, Related and Oxford Properties, the development is quite pleasant. The point is the city needs to be friendly to mixed-use development, not that big corporate or REIT ownership inherently leads to bad neighborhoods.
    - SoftTalker 1mo ago
      You also need customers who are OK with the fact that local businesses are going to be more expensive than Walmart or Costco and the corporate restaurants that are clustered around them. This sort of happens by default in neighborhoods where the externalities of car ownership are properly priced, because even though Joe's Grocery is more expensive, it's still cheaper to walk there and shop than it is to own a car and drive to a big supermarket. But it's difficult/impossible for these kinds of small businesses to flourish in the suburbs where the default is to drive everywhere. If I'm driving anyway, I might as well go get the best prices.
    - gipp 1mo ago
tancop 1mo ago
Pure market based solutions will never work and neither will restrictive planning policies. The only way to bring back real neighborhoods is to completely remove fixed zoning for direct neighbor votes or local councils deciding individual projects, and create a federal investment fund that will give cheap loans to builders who plan to do what the community actually wants. Of course the root cause of this is wealth concentration, and that's not something you can fix with a couple new laws.
- foxglacier 1mo ago
  How is it wealth concentration? TFA claims the opposite - distributed ownership as the cause. I agree with you about planning. Councils keep wanting to control how their neighborhoods look - because people who live there don't want their own stupid neighbors making their own decisions and "ruining" it. So they impose rules that lead to uniformity. Where I live, most new houses look indistinguishable from each other, but they all have the same multi colored offset walls with two different cladding types and alternating angles of their roofs. A style guideline made by the council to force them to look interesting.
  - AngryData 1mo ago
    Except the distributed ownership is FAR from being anywhere near evenly distributed. 7-11 doesn't have half the population holding 50%+ of its value. It has 50% of the population holding 1% of the business, 1% holding 10% of the business, and then 0.1% holding 50%+ of the business.
aeturnum 1mo ago
I'll never miss an opportunity to promote this TED talk from James Kunstler[1]. It's a real pleasure to see a skilled hater take a vile trend to task and he does so with gusto. It's from 2004 and really feels like it, but the central points remain just as true today. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_the_ghastly_tragedy_of_the_suburbs https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_the_ghastly_...
kjshsh123 1mo ago
Land value tax would solve this.
javier_e06 1mo ago
Not to be a contrarian but that vanilla look is what creates traction or commerce. When we pull into a 7-Eleven weather in Seattle or Florida people want the same experience and the same expectations. And as such with end with liminal space. A sad space where the coffee and the Slim-Jim are the same. The familiarity of nowhere or anywhere America.
- snohobro 1mo ago
  I think abstracted a bit more, this is just humanity in general, and isn’t really an America only thing. Humans like and gravitate toward homogeneity. Same is comfortable, same is safe. The more I travel and see big cities around the world, the more I recognize how closely related they are to major US cities. Like sure, there’s nuanced differences, and you can experience a wide variety of cultures and history. Ultimately though, they all have same metropolitan features, issues, positives, and characteristics. It’s really the small villages and grass roots communities that shine with heritage, tradition, and unique experiences. Unique of course when compared against one another, but even more homogeneous within their own borders.

79 points by iamnothere 1mo ago

Interesting, but I kind of like the building :)

Bogle (Mr Vanguard himself) saw this coming and warned us, but it was perhaps too late: https://ia601506.us.archive.org/26/items/bogle-managerial-capitalism/Bogle-managerial-capitalism.pdf https://ia601506.us.archive.org/26/items/bogle-managerial-ca...

happyopossum 1mo ago
The linked letter has absolutely nothing to do with TFA other than a very tenuous link to Vanguard: It was written a founder who hasn't been in charge of Vanguard for several decades.

FLeXMurphy 1mo ago

Ah, perfect. A patronizing tone to start off the article. Where have I seen this before?

jafo1989 1mo ago
As a frequent walker to the 7-11 in my "soul-crushing suburban district", I decided to look up the 7-11 landscape in Williamsburg, Virginia using the satellite view in Google Maps. Every single one of them is walkable from residential property. My guess is the author lives in a densely populated urban area, and doesn't understand how "soul-crushing suburban districts" really work. I've been walking to my 7-11 for over 30 years, and have gotten to know many attendants over the years.
- iamnothere 1mo ago
  Way to miss the entire point of the article. It’s not anti 7-11, it’s against underinvestment in local properties and lack of reasonable planning, driven by distant ownership. I can also walk to a convenience store, in fact I’m fairly lucky with the amenities available in my neighborhood, but many places I’ve been (and previously lived) are disorganized and lack the livability of communities where the buildings have primarily local owners.
  - jafo1989 1mo ago
    Point is: I enjoy my neighborhood 7-11 without caring about how it looks, who owns it, or worrying about all the capitalism trade-offs. It's just a 7-11. The charm is the walk and the experience.
    - iamnothere 1mo ago
      You seem really stuck on 7-11. The article is not about 7-11. That’s just the example the author used, and honestly the author could have picked a better one. Just imagine that they picked vape shops or something instead. I have lived in places where you can’t walk anywhere useful because the absentee owners didn’t want to invest in finding good tenants. The buildings were fine, but partially empty, and there was even a shortage of local office space, so they could have rented at a premium with just a little bit of investment.
      - deleted 1mo ago
        [deleted]
      - jafo1989 1mo ago
        They are stores. You go to them and buy stuff you need, and then leave. If you don't have good stores near you, you move to another place that does. Is life really that complicated?
        iamnothere 1mo ago

schnevets 1mo ago

So Vanguard owns one-eighth of ADC, an REIT whose stock price has declined 2.65% in the last 5 years. Surely there is space in the market for a smaller, leaner, possibly privately-owned REIT whose values more closely align with 2026 values and will one day be able to eat ADC's lunch.

iamnothere 1mo ago
CRE is a tough market right now, but you would think that a little bit of minimal creativity and effort could make an impact. I get annoyed with the overreliance on murals to provide faux authenticity, but even that is usually better than a bland box.
sidewndr46 1mo ago
I think the tax incentives of an REIT pretty much mandate it be publicly traded?
mixdup 1mo ago
only a 2.65% decline in a commercial real estate REIT is probably beating the market
Analemma_ 1mo ago
Commercial real estate got walloped by covid and the damage is still making its way through the system. A 2.65% decline in the last 5 years is probably one of the better performers in the sector.

spicyusername 1mo ago

I mean, to be fair, local owners of buildings also neglect them sometimes. So, even if this is a problem, fixing it doesn't immediately make neighborhoods beautiful.

rootsudo 1mo ago

On the flip side: your retirement is dependent on the property listed in the article and if no improvements are needed while it generates a return… It means you’re a landlord! Congratulations!! Give yourself a round of applause. By not maintaining it, you are electing to keep cash flow high and profits secured. The overall commercial market has negative numbers so even if said REIT is down 2.65% it’s hedged together with numerous properties in a nice geographic arbitrage opportunity to minimize losses. Is that really… So bad?

SoftTalker 1mo ago
A common saying is that in real estate, you make your money when you buy and when you sell, in other words not paying too much and timing sales to profit from appreciation. Cash flow from rent isn't a big part of it, that normally covers taxes, insurance, debt servicing, and maintenance but not a whole lot more.
- rootsudo 1mo ago
  Well, it depends, if you’re going for ARV and appreciation, cash flow helps a lot on holding costs. While I agree with you make money when you buy/biggerpockets quotes, you want cash flow to minimize holding costs.
- senordevnyc 1mo ago
  I've been investing in real estate for decades now, and the version I've always heard is that you make your money when you buy, NOT when you sell. Also, other than flippers, the vast majority of real estate investors I'm familiar with are very focused on buying cashflow, and prefer never to sell. It might be different for REITs focused on CRE, I'm not as familiar with that space, but my impression has always been that the biggest and most successful investors are buying and holding, not trading.
  - SoftTalker 1mo ago
    Sure, if you're buying in an appreciating area, and the rent covers the carrying costs, you hang on to the property as long as you can or as long as the property is a still a good fit in your diversification plan. I would agree that not overpaying is probably the most important thing.

nemomarx 1mo ago

I want to see what the author considers a nice 7-11 for contrast, because it seems normal to me? Could be more walkable of course but I'm not sure that's on the REIT. They didn't lay out the roads or anything. The wood paneling and nice front lights actually seem like an improvement over local 7-11s if anything.

sroussey 1mo ago
Yeah, I was thinking the same — this one looks nicer than the ones near me.

askafriend 1mo ago

It looks like a normal 7-Eleven.

ddj231 1mo ago

seems like aesthetically it matches its surroundings. it doesn't seem like an outlier in the neighborhood which kind of defeats the premise of the article.

Ozzie_osman 1mo ago

In systems thinking, this would be called "intrinsic responsibility" (or lack thereof). > Intrinsic responsibility” means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision making directly and quickly and compellingly to the decision makers. Because the pilot of a plane rides in the front of the plane, that pilot is intrinsically responsible. He or she will experience directly the consequences of his or her decisions. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12139955-intrinsic-responsibility-means-that-the-system-is-designed-to-send https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12139955-intrinsic-responsi...

skybrian 1mo ago
How does that work, though? In the early days, pilots were daredevils. It doesn’t seem like aviation became safer because pilots took risks? Workspace safety didn’t improve by blaming the workers, even though they bore the risk.
- snackbroken 1mo ago
  Workplace safety improved massively when labor unions became a thing and workers got a say in safety standards.
- roarcher 1mo ago
  The workers were not the decision makers.
- HawtAds 1mo ago
  > It doesn’t seem like aviation became safer because pilots took risks That's pretty much the job of test pilots even today. They are usually dual trained pilots and engineers/technicians, and their job is basically to QA new planes. In military aviation especially test pilots are often feeders into the astronaut program (a different but similar type of daredevil).
- Krutonium 1mo ago
  On the contrary, rules and regulations are written in blood, and airplanes are manufactured stronger in different ways because pilots took risks. The Wings don't shear off when the pilot yanks the yoke left and up because someone did before, and the Wings either fell off or didn't - but until it happened, the wings were an unknown quantity. And that's just one example. That's basically the job description of a Test Pilot.

sodality2 1mo ago

This was my home gas station for 4 years so I may be biased, but it is fine. Symptomatic of a deeper car-centric problem, sure.

yowayb 1mo ago
I have fond high school memories at gas stations
- SoftTalker 1mo ago
  Younger than that for me. As kids in elementary school my friends and I used to ride our bikes to the gas station at the entrance to our subdivision. They only had like one rack of candy bars and a soda vending machine, but for a 10 year old with some change in his pocket that was great. This was the mid-1970s. There was a larger "convenience store" at the other end of the next subdivision, you could bike to it but it was a few miles so we went there less often. They had a lot more snack choices though, and you could get a glimpse of the covers of the Playboy magazines that were on the shelf behind the counter.

trgn 1mo ago

the commodification of everything, just one more example. once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

bittercynic 1mo ago
I think we're in agreement that commodification is often harmful, and should be constrained more than it currently is. It seems many of our fellow commenters are pretty enthusiastic about turning everything into a financial asset, though.

HawtAds 1mo ago

No, this is just poor management. Japanese 7-11s are ran better because of better culture, products and management. It's not magic.

Transformanshen 1mo ago
I tend to agree with you
etdznots 1mo ago
They have a different culture and values, the US’s strengths lie in individualism and the character of the individuals that live here, and that’s both good and bad. But it’s entirely unsurprising that when responsibility and ownership is sharded up into trillions of tiny pieces and diffused that the outcome is awful.
loco5niner 1mo ago
I'm certainly a fan of Japanese products. They are high-quality, etc. And everything was clean and orderly and amazing as a short-term visitor over 20 years ago. I would not be quick to say it is a better culture though, I suspect some negative are quite hidden, and lurking underneath the cultural norms. Again, as an outsider, I have lots of positive thoughts about Japanese culture.

zzzeek 1mo ago

7-11's, which I frequent often, need a slightly higher food quality selection to appease affluents like me, but as far as how they look, that's what a 7-11 looks like! It's what I look for when I'm driving, on "stroads" / highways, and am looking for an exactly predictable experience, one which is low-key, inexpensive, and does not imply a formal dress code. I'd never want a 7-11 to look like a brownstone in the west village, that would imply an entirely different kind of business establishment.

iamnothere 1mo ago
This does seem like a fair criticism, the 7-11 style seems fine to me. (The food selection is much better in Japanese 7-11s, though.) When I see them they are usually in better shape than other nearby stations. Small touches such as landscaping can really make a difference. For example, 7-11s at the beach often seem to put in a little more effort, although I don’t know if that’s the store or the landlord.
- zzzeek 1mo ago
  yes japanese 7-11s are exactly what i had in mind. a 7-11 that also has good quality sushi to go would be amazing. it's commonplace in bodegas in NYC (more the Asian owned ones) for example. that and, just one actual dark chocolate selection amidst the piles of low-quality milk chocolate M&Ms and hershey products. it's not a big ask.
  - stryan 1mo ago
    Good news for you then, they are trying to increase the food quality to be closer to the Japanese stores: https://www.tastingtable.com/2216099/7-eleven-major-changes-better-food-options/ https://www.tastingtable.com/2216099/7-eleven-major-changes-... The decline of the classic US fast food restaurants (McD's, Wendy's, BK) has been matched by gas station food getting better and better. The 7-11 breakfast sandwiches are pretty good these days and sometimes the hamburgers even taste like real meat :) .

Terr_ 1mo ago

By that logic, I also own a microscopic share in all sorts of businesses, many of which have their own sadness or disinterest. Is there anything that makes real-estate significantly different, beyond how the pathos can be more-easily photographed? In other words, I expect the (legitimate) issues raised in the article have close analogues in legal/financial/incentive problems for other forms of investment. > The shortcoming of such analyses is that they make it difficult to capture the value that would accrue to a project that created a neighborhood. Sounds like an opportunity for experts in the field to develop and sell a good kind of analysis! Though point-taken: It'd still be hard to attract cautious investors until something is perceived as "proven".

pessimizer 1mo ago

Absentee owners should be taxed out of existence. The distance between an investment and the people who understand it is a law enforcement liability (it encourages fraud), a public liability (it inevitably concentrates ownership who can easily lobby and get bailouts), and leads to missed opportunities and inefficient use. The mass US real estate fraud that ended in 2008 was entirely built around loaning money to people who weren't creditworthy for overvalued property that they had no expertise to judge, then immediately selling that loan to somebody who would hide it in a complex product and immediately sell it again. Eventually, these was sold to municipalities and pension funds in complex gambling vehicles whose value would fall to zero if anything went wrong in this structure, after being branded "AAA" by institutions 1) paid by the people selling the products, and 2) literally written into legislation by name and into the rules governing the pension funds. That's what distance between an investor and in investment gets you. Tax every single hop. Make them break themselves up. edit: Yes it does. Tax them. These transactions cost the public more than direct transactions. I know that people feel like they're far beyond having to justify a tax other than "I like it, so don't tax it," but this distance in and of itself imposes costs to the public. If you dump money into Vanguard, and Vanguard then invests in an index, Vanguard gets taxed and you get taxed, too. Poof, no more Vanguard. The horrible outcome of that is that people understand the stocks they're investing in, and that the stock market becomes a repository of intelligence - which is what I thought was supposed to justify it. Nobody cares about justice, though. They're libertarians when they're rich and revolutionaries when they're poor. Government to protect my stuff when I have stuff, government that gives me stuff when I don't have stuff.

Terr_ 1mo ago
I assume that proposal extends to all sorts of investment (e.g. general business stocks) and isn't scoped to real-estate alone?

skybrian 1mo ago

Zoning might be seen as a way of getting local control over property that’s actually owned by someone else, for better or worse. Developers often have to make concessions to local governments to get approval, and NIMBYism has its downsides. A local government has options like creating a historical district if they really want to control aesthetics. A home owner’s association can control aesthetics in a residential area. They are just people and you might disagree with their decisions. Real estate is expensive. Large commercial properties usually require rich owners. the local gentry that owns farms and car dealerships and shopping malls and fast-food franchises isn’t necessarily any more interested in aethetics than an REIT. It seems like land-use governance is always going to be messy no matter how it’s structured?

throwitaway222 1mo ago

I think part of the reason the US doesn't feel like the US anymore is that ownership of properties is no longer Bob who dreamed of some day opening a Pizza shop on Main st. It's all corporate now, all the way down.

cogman10 1mo ago
Yup. Consolidation of the markets is ultimately what's destroyed small businesses. It's currently working on the likes of dentists and vets. The US has devolved to the point where only someone with a large amount of wealth can start and run a business. You can't open up a small hardware shop anymore because no bank will give that loan and no supplier will give you the same wholesale prices they give to the likes of Home Depot or Lowes or heck even Walmart. At every level in the supply distribution system we've seen consolidation and ultimately locking out of competition. For example, here's why independent pharmacists have been going out of business [1]. We need new Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt anti-trust breakups to make capitalism work again. Capitalism can't work without a diverse competitive market. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmZtBW54GNI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmZtBW54GNI
- MisterTea 1mo ago
  > We need new Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt anti-trust breakups to make capitalism work again. Too bad the oligarchs slowly whittled away the government immune system until it was weak enough to infect last election cycle and is busy destroying what little is left. America seems to be headed into a feudal dark age. Once the government is toothless only the people can fix it with mass protest and/or violence.
  - cogman10 1mo ago
    There were oligarchs with massive amounts of power in the days of the Roosevelts. Rockefeller, Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Vanderbilt. These were all huge oligarchs that definitely fought to try and keep America in a feudal dark age. Things seem bleak, but we've been here before and came out of it better.

cyberax 1mo ago

This is a stupid article. "Sad" is not an objective criterion. Is IKEA furniture sad? I think the author would say so. I _love_ the pictured 7-Elevens, especially the one in Austin, TX. They are perfectly functional: you drop in, get whatever items you need, and get out in seconds. Everything is designed to help you with that. The parking lot is a necessity for convenience stores because you likely won't invest 30-40 minutes of your time to _walk_ to a convenience store. You might as well just walk to a full-blown store. The exceptions are, of course, "food deserts" where the density death spiral has hit the bottom and made the city unliveable (see: Manhattan, Tokyo). The places like "Captains Row" are beautiful to look at but hellish to actually _live_ in. Ask me how I know. They are the equivalent of the restored classic cars: beautiful to look at, but unsafe and uncomfortable for actual use compared to modern cars.

bradly 1mo ago

In the past 7-Eleven was unique in the franchise world where you could make a comfortable living owning a single store and that was the major ownership model. McDonalds and other options at the time really depended on a multi-store ownership model. Corporate 7-Eleven (Southland Corp technically) moved away from this single store model in the mid to late 90's, instead preferring single, larger corporations in a region, owning 10+ stores over a single store owner. They made this happen over a 20 year span by changing the contracts franchisees sign and must to re-sign every x years. Every contract renewal drastically reduced the single store income and made it much harder for single store owners to make a living. Corporate also started preferring to give new stores to existing, large scale franchises over new store owners which changes the initial capital needed for a store by over 10x as with an existing store you will have to pay the rights from the previous franchisee instead of just the corporate. My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles all own or have owned 7-Eleven stores and have since the 80's. I've worked there, been to their conferences, and still get to hear about them at all family gatherings :)

JackFr 1mo ago
I don't know if it's causative, but that seems to coincide with the move from Southland Corp to being run by the Japanese parent Seven & i Holdings.
SoftTalker 1mo ago
McDonalds was the same early on, but evolved into a real-estate operation that also sells hamburgers. Last I knew (this was the 1990s) there were still a few single-store franchisees but most franchisees owned at least half a dozen stores in a market. I also think the investment required to buy a franchise is vastly larger than it was in the beginning. It's really only affordable to owners who can leverage the income they are making from the stores they already own. AFAIK they do still require owners to be operators. You can't own a McDonalds franchise passively. But I'm not sure that's still the case.
- greedo 1mo ago
  Back in the 80's you still needed to have multiple stores. Otherwise your overhead from back office and maintenance stuff would just eat up too much profits. Once you hit three stores, you could start to make serious money if you ran a tight ship.

kccqzy 1mo ago

The article spends a lot of time describing problems that I would see as a result of car centricity and land use patterns, but it just fails to make a point on why it’s a problem caused by REITs. You can easily go to NYC and find entire neighborhoods owned by large absentee landlords and yet are still walkable and desirable to live in. Yes perhaps regulations and tax laws favor large firms, but in the end zoning laws can easily require those large firms to build desirable neighborhoods.

gipp 1mo ago
> You can easily go to NYC and find entire neighborhoods owned by large absentee landlords and yet are still walkable and desirable to live in. Sure, because they were largely built a hundred years ago, and parceled into lots a hundred more before that, and because NYC remains uniquely friendly to continued mixed-use development today.
- kccqzy 1mo ago
  No. You can look at the recent Hudson Yards development. Largely owned by two companies, Related and Oxford Properties, the development is quite pleasant. The point is the city needs to be friendly to mixed-use development, not that big corporate or REIT ownership inherently leads to bad neighborhoods.
  - SoftTalker 1mo ago
    You also need customers who are OK with the fact that local businesses are going to be more expensive than Walmart or Costco and the corporate restaurants that are clustered around them. This sort of happens by default in neighborhoods where the externalities of car ownership are properly priced, because even though Joe's Grocery is more expensive, it's still cheaper to walk there and shop than it is to own a car and drive to a big supermarket. But it's difficult/impossible for these kinds of small businesses to flourish in the suburbs where the default is to drive everywhere. If I'm driving anyway, I might as well go get the best prices.
  - gipp 1mo ago

tancop 1mo ago

Pure market based solutions will never work and neither will restrictive planning policies. The only way to bring back real neighborhoods is to completely remove fixed zoning for direct neighbor votes or local councils deciding individual projects, and create a federal investment fund that will give cheap loans to builders who plan to do what the community actually wants. Of course the root cause of this is wealth concentration, and that's not something you can fix with a couple new laws.

foxglacier 1mo ago
How is it wealth concentration? TFA claims the opposite - distributed ownership as the cause. I agree with you about planning. Councils keep wanting to control how their neighborhoods look - because people who live there don't want their own stupid neighbors making their own decisions and "ruining" it. So they impose rules that lead to uniformity. Where I live, most new houses look indistinguishable from each other, but they all have the same multi colored offset walls with two different cladding types and alternating angles of their roofs. A style guideline made by the council to force them to look interesting.
- AngryData 1mo ago
  Except the distributed ownership is FAR from being anywhere near evenly distributed. 7-11 doesn't have half the population holding 50%+ of its value. It has 50% of the population holding 1% of the business, 1% holding 10% of the business, and then 0.1% holding 50%+ of the business.

aeturnum 1mo ago

I'll never miss an opportunity to promote this TED talk from James Kunstler[1]. It's a real pleasure to see a skilled hater take a vile trend to task and he does so with gusto. It's from 2004 and really feels like it, but the central points remain just as true today. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_the_ghastly_tragedy_of_the_suburbs https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_the_ghastly_...

kjshsh123 1mo ago

Land value tax would solve this.

javier_e06 1mo ago

Not to be a contrarian but that vanilla look is what creates traction or commerce. When we pull into a 7-Eleven weather in Seattle or Florida people want the same experience and the same expectations. And as such with end with liminal space. A sad space where the coffee and the Slim-Jim are the same. The familiarity of nowhere or anywhere America.

snohobro 1mo ago
I think abstracted a bit more, this is just humanity in general, and isn’t really an America only thing. Humans like and gravitate toward homogeneity. Same is comfortable, same is safe. The more I travel and see big cities around the world, the more I recognize how closely related they are to major US cities. Like sure, there’s nuanced differences, and you can experience a wide variety of cultures and history. Ultimately though, they all have same metropolitan features, issues, positives, and characteristics. It’s really the small villages and grass roots communities that shine with heritage, tradition, and unique experiences. Unique of course when compared against one another, but even more homogeneous within their own borders.