How Franchise Restaurants Opened the Door to the Gig Economy

19:45So there definitely was that, there was that dynamic. On the other hand, there are some chains that don't give that protection, for example. Subway is an example of one where they will open one up across the street from you. Or if there was some litigation in the past with, let's say, Church's Chicken merges with Popeye's. Well, you know, the contract might protect the Church's, but they could put a Popeye's across the street from you. So there is still some of that risk. But, you know, if you have any, you know, like more, you know, Marxist-inclient listeners, you know, there's just, you know, everyone.

20:11who's a worker? You know, it's someone who doesn't have access to the means of production. So they have to, you know, sell their labor, you know, to a capitalist. But, you know, franchising has this whole other layer of these are people who can afford to open a restaurant. They have some capital. They supply capital as well as labor. They're investors, but they don't have the means of marketing at the scale. They don't have a brand. And so another thing you see in the whole history of franchising is franchisees saying, yeah, you know, I kind of wanted to be an entrepreneur or I used to own like my own donut shop.

20:38But, you know, once Dunkin' donuts or at that time there was another chain called mr donut you know came to town i really couldn't compete i had to sell out you know and join their chain and that brand is very powerful so there's uh this is even in the film uh you know ray crock famously uh you know he stole all the they agreed to sell their whole business basically the mcdonald brothers the guys who created mcdonald's uh to him and he but after he controlled the mcdonald's name and the trademark they thought they could keep operating you know and doing and he just opened a mcdonald's right across the street from their original place and and put them out of business and so that's something that you see, that brand is very powerful, but it also gives the franchisor power for the franchisee to do what they say.

21:14Tracy Alloway:You know, I'm not surprised that McDonald's did this. Probably the only fact that really sticks out at me from Ray Kroc's autobiography, where he's like talking about his personal life. And he was like in love with some woman. And in like one sentence is like, oh, she was married at the time and I took her away from her husband. Or it's like one paragraph. So I was like, oh, he's very forthright about that. So I can't say I'm surprised that he opened up a McDonald's across the street from a normal aside, but actually a goal pursuing individual. Yes. Related to this. One thing I was very surprised to learn from your book is that there are no poaching agreements between McDonald's.

21:51So if I'm a worker at a particular McDonald's franchise and I want to go work for another one, I have to get the permission of my current franchise owner in order to do that. Yeah. And they may have since dropped those, But they had them in a lot of chains did for a very long time. And that sort of gets at this this weird niche that they've been able to occupy in antitrust and labor law. So this is the I think I would characterize it fairly as the absurdity of antitrust law where there is this what is called the vertical horizontal distinction. And what that means is that, you know, for two McDonald's across town to pick up the phone and say, hey, don't hire any of my workers.

22:27I won't hire any of yours. That's a horizontal agreement that is so, so illegal you're going to face. You might go to jail for doing that. But if McDonald's from above tells them unilaterally, don't hire each other's workers, it's not per se illegal. It gets put under what's called the rule of reason, which just means that now you have it keeps people in my profession employed, but you have competing econometric reports. You know, it's it's very difficult for a plaintiff, for a worker to challenge these kinds of no poach agreements, though they have tried, because it's very difficult to win. because once it's vertical, now McDonald's can enter evidence that says, yeah, maybe it has a bad effect on our wages, but it helps us sell more hamburgers because, again, we're a single entity.

23:08This just makes it more efficient. And in that sense, low wages can be more efficient.

23:12Tracy Alloway:I think I'm just going to accept that we're just going to use McDonald's as a standard for franchising. Let's say we're talking about McDonald's. Some do very well, some maybe less So is there anything that the franchisee actually has discretion on that could either improve or lessen their odds of success? Other than bananas at Dunkin' Donuts. How hard they work. And I think the key to that is looking at what are they then incentivized to exert that effort towards? And it is because the one thing that McDonald's doesn't directly touch is, besides bananas, is their labor cost. So how big is your crew?

23:46Actually, the staffing requirements are even required. So how hard are they working? How low are their wages? and making sure everyone's, you know, working as hard as possible.

23:52Tracy Alloway:The owner doesn't have any discretion about the staffing levels? No, staffing levels are mandated in the operations manual, which is incorporated into the contract and can be unilaterally changed at any time by McDonald's. So it's a very one-sided contract. You know, to be fair, the pro argument for that is that, you know, again, willing, consenting buyers and sellers, and it incentivizes those franchisees to follow the system and to work as hard as they possibly can. Sorry, just to make this very clear, The major lever that franchisees have to be a better business, to produce more money, is to basically squeeze wage costs.

24:26Yeah. Wow. And you can see, you know, in the and this is something, again, franchises are very open about. I think there's a quote in the book that's from another book called Franchise Dreams. But, you know, a franchisor just look at entrepreneur makes the worst franchisee. You don't want someone who's an independent thinker who has their own business ideas. Similarly, Ray Kroc said, you know, it doesn't take any particular aptitude or intellect to make it in one of our restaurants. It just takes grit and hard work. He wanted workers. As a matter of fact, he sought out people who really needed this.

24:55You know, his first investors in McDonald's were his friends from the country club. Oh, yeah, it's a nice investment opportunity. You know, yeah, I'll put in some money. And sure, I'll manage the restaurant in my spare time. It didn't work out. They didn't put in the work. And so he found people who were a little more scrappy. You know, yeah. Immigrants, you know. Yeah.

25:14Tracy Alloway:There are constraints or are there not like, let's say I wanted to open a McDonald's, but I didn't want to work hard. I just wanted an investment. Am I allowed to like front someone else capital to do that? How does that work? I don't know. You never hear very much about like, say, I don't know, P.E. or finance, like backing like a thousand new franchisees. Is that allowed? Oh, yes. A lot of the franchise contracts, my other work outside the book, a lot of this work joint with Marshall Steinbaum and Sergio Pinto, we actually coded, we read hundreds of franchise contracts. Those guys have since like digitized and, you know, they have thousands of contracts and one key contract clause in across most chains is a personal obligation to work.

25:54So you are not allowed to be a passive investor. And you also have to, also there's no corporate shield. If you mess up, they can come for your house and your car and your savings and all that stuff. That said, I wouldn't want to hide this. There has been a move in recent years to more of a different kind of franchise operator. Some of them are incorporated now. Some of them own multiple, even hundreds of locations. Some of them even own locations across multiple chains. And since then also, there's been a migration. Private equity used to only own the franchise brands. And that's a great business.

26:26Like Burger King famously has flipped through private equity owners. All you got to do is get those royalties. Someone else already built the brand. You know, just all it is is cash. But since then, there's been private equity franchise operators. So it's a very different dynamic. It's no longer obviously a private equity firm is a legal entity, not a person. They can't exert effort. They can hire people that do that. But there is a new breed of franchisee that in some chains that's a little bit different than the old model. Again, I hate to bring up AI in every single conversation that we do nowadays, but I think it's kind of unavoidable.

26:59We have all this new technology and Joe and I have done plenty of trucking episodes where we talk about, you know, tech that monitors whether people's eyes are open and things like that. Does that new technology play a role in, I guess, exerting more control over some of these franchises? It absolutely does. And it started in the 1990s with broadband internet and is accelerating now with AI for sure. So think about the 1960s, right? You want to have this legal structure where this independent operator is operating the restaurant. They kick me back a royalty. I try to control everything they do.

27:32But how can you really control it? There's fax machines, there's telephones, you can send secret shoppers, but there's only so much you can really do. So by the 1990s, particularly with broadband internet connected to the cash registers through point-of-sale systems, there's a steady data stream now going back to headquarters where they have an intense amount of control. And I think one of the interesting things about that technological change is, first of all, in terms of the motivation for these kinds of outsourced industrial structures, it's usually technology is the story. But they started doing this way before the technology.

28:00But now that technology exists, it allows – just think about a truly vertically integrated corporation like U.S. Steel or General Motors in 1950. The control they have over all of their plants is less than McDonald's that they own. And they employ those hundreds of thousands of industrial workers. McDonald's now hardly employs anybody, but they have way more control because they're able to get that stream of data. And now the AI has made that surveillance of workers themselves. And by the way, you don't have to fire them if they're too slow at the register. You just send a note to the franchisee, hey, so-and-so, they even know the names of the employees, you know, is a little too slow.

28:35Do something about that, you know.

28:37Tracy Alloway:Wait, can you say, just talking more about like, I guess this is theory of the firm type stuff. Explain this notion that like a U.S. deal, it's not intuitive to most people, is like would be a more distributed type of entity than a McDonald's. Why is that? What do you talk, when you say that, what do you mean? Yeah. So I think, you know, so the theory of the firm, I think, you know, no matter your political proclivities, you know, like for, you know, Marx called the firm the hidden boat of production. What happens there is that there's an entity that owns assets and there's someone who works and you put them together and it happens inside a firm.

29:11Coase, the great Chicago conservative economist had a similar notion where what the nature of the firm is, is command. A workman doesn't go from department Y to department X because of a change in relative prices, but because it's ordered to do so. So that was sort of the reason why that's the classical economic reason why firms exist. And then there's, of course, Chandler with his Visible Hand book, which is the foundation for most business history of this, is why do we have these big corporations? And his answer was the economics of high throughput and the efficiencies of, you know, if you want to make steel, you can't really rely on the uncertainties of those of those prices.

29:46You kind of want to have everything under control and have managers, you know, sort of running it. What they're trying to do with franchising is get sort of that same type of control, but without having the legal risks and liabilities. And I would say just one more thing is that the legal door that franchisors opened in the 1960s and 1970s has since been, you know, started as a little loophole. Now it's just a huge bay door that an Uber or Amazon can walk through. So Amazon's fascinated because they are very much like a U.S. steel in that they found a need to totally reorganize distribution in the United States.

30:19They didn't want to rely on USPS. They didn't rely on UPS or FedEx. They brought it all back in-house in economic terms and the fact that they controlled it. But they did not bring it in-house in terms of legal liabilities because those trucks driving around your neighborhood are independent contractors. And they are able to control them because of this litigation and legislation battles that franchisors fought in the 60s and 70s to legalize those kinds of controls. What exactly is, I guess, the concrete lineage between the franchise model and the gig economy and the independent contractors? Yeah.

30:50So franchisors on the 1960s and 1970s, you know, don't like the antitrust jurisprudence that says you can't control independent businesses through, I don't know if I've used this term yet, but vertical restraints is like the term of art and antitrust for that. So they go about filing cases to, you know, a very concerted, very smart strategic effort to change the law. They ended up having a huge, very important ally in the University of Chicago economics department and law school who are have the same ideas that, you know, we shouldn't be judging. What is this, you know, hoary old idea of the independent entrepreneur?

31:21Like efficiency. That's all we care about. So they won those battles in the courts. And then after that, they also were able to head off any, you know, after they win those, get in this control. You start seeing the Department of Labor, the National Labor Relations Board and litigants say, wait a minute, all that control, you probably should be responsible, you know, for the underpayment of wages. Or let's say, you know, for example, Domino's, you've got this 30 minute delivery rule. Your driver's speeding to make that delivery. He hits somebody. That's kind of your fault. You know, that's not the franchisee's fault or even the driver's.

31:50So they win all these. So they are able to say, well, no, that doesn't really apply to us. You know, we they're still so they're able to have their cake and eat it, too. And so that's just that there's not only there's any explicit coordination. But once you start getting companies to try to do this with, you know, rather than explicit contractual vertical restraints, it's algorithmic. You know, here's the route you're going to drive. Here's the price you're going to charge. They're able to do it that way. And that would not have been or that would have raised some judicial eyebrows if they had tried to do Uber in the 1960s.

32:18So, you know, obviously the technology is highly important, but the other story I think is important too is that the fact that these things are legally permissible is the result of this, of franchisor's efforts.

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34:16Tracy Alloway:With Okta, you'll turn risk into opportunity. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. Okta secures AI. So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300 ,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 % of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. IBM. Amazon, Uber, do they still use that, like, be your own boss and start your own business rhetoric when they're trying to look for new drivers or little local carriers?

35:04Yeah, they do. But with the Amazon models even closer to franchising Uber, because, you know, Uber and Lyft, it's each driver is, you know, treated as sort of like an independent entrepreneur. They own their own business. Yeah, be your own boss. And that's a powerful thing. I want to be my own boss. I mean, no, no, it is, I guess, an American, like a very American. That's how you get your nest egg and take care of yourself and your family. But Amazon, it's called their delivery service partner or DSP model, is much closer to a franchise in that every driver is not an independent entrepreneur. It's the contractor company.

35:34Right.

35:35Tracy Alloway:So they might have like 30 or whatever. Yeah, 30 trucks or whatever. Yeah. So it's a small it's a relatively small business. You know, Amazon, I think, even fronts some of the capital, but it's a legally distinct entity, even though it's painted with the Amazon logo, you know, and tightly controlled. Since you're an economist and you mentioned regressions before, do you have any empirical research about the relationship between the growth of the franchise model and wages in the U.S.? Because, again, like if we're talking about the primary lever that an independent franchise owner can actually pull to improve the business, it's all wages.

36:08Yeah. So I don't have that time series of the growth of franchising and the growth of wages. But there are my work and other work. We do know a couple of things about franchising. One is that if you're a wage worker now, there's work from Kruger back in the 1990s. There's David Weil, who's I should have mentioned him before. He's like the economist on this stuff. He wrote a book called The Fisher Workplace, where we do know that even within the same chain, you want to be at the company owned one, not at the franchised one, because your wages will be higher. You'll have a higher tenure wage profile, meaning you're going to get promoted and your wage is going to go up more over time.

36:40And also franchised establishments violate their workers' safety and other rights at a much higher rate than ones that are company owned. So we do know that stuff. And then we have my work. We have one. We were able to take advantage of a really nice natural experiment where Washington state entered a consent decree with McDonald's and a bunch of other chains to get rid of those no poach agreements I mentioned earlier. And we found, I mean, maybe not surprising, but there's a causal effect. Once they got rid of those no-posture agreements, wages went up. And then, you know, again, because it's very hard, you don't want to be careful as an economist, you know, it's hard to get those natural experiments.

37:12So we don't have that for like specific contract terms. But in work, again, with Marshall Steinbaum and Sergio, we found, you know, correlations with lower wages. And then they have a new paper where they look at franchise contracts over time and find that they have gotten more restrictive, even over the past 20 years. Wait, how do they actually measure that? Now I'm really interested because if we're talking about, well, I guess I'm interested in how the actual like franchisor communicates a lot of the restrictions to the actual business. Like, how do they do that? And then how do you tally that up in an empirical way?

37:45Yeah. So studying franchising, I was very fortunate because these contracts are sort of public records. So there's a requirement from a 1979 Federal Trade Commission rule that requires franchisors to furnish to a franchisee what's called a franchise disclosure document, which is sort of plain English, lays out key contract terms, what the royalty is going to be. and basically it's meant to inform the franchisee. The idea being the franchisees are getting swindled into entering these incredibly one-sided contracts. They should know what they're getting into. Let's make a law to disclose that. So there's this franchise disclosure document and then usually the franchisor will file as an attachment the entire franchise contract.

38:25So we have the contracts and they're not filed with the FTC but some states require them to be filed. So you just go to Wisconsin or California, anyone who wants to do a study on this, you can get the contracts. Back in when I was doing this 10 years ago, I had to read the contracts and hand code them. It took me like 18 months. But I got through 530 contracts, hundreds of contract terms. So we got a pretty good, but it's only a cross section. But what my colleagues have been able to do since then is, I mean, just text recognition software and text scraping abilities and AI. In an afternoon, you could program a computer to just scrape thousands of these contracts and you can get them over time, which I wasn't able to do.

39:02But yes, these are public records. So anyone could do this.

39:05Tracy Alloway:You mentioned treatment of workers and wages at McDonald's franchise locations versus the McDonald's owned and operated locations. What about franchise locations versus just pure independent restaurants? Because it seems like one of these things that people don't want to talk about that much, that when we talk about like wages, when we talk about wage theft and some of these other things, we all like to glorify small businesses. But there's a lot of like these pathologies seem to be fairly prevalent or more prevalent, I think, at small businesses than, say, like large corporations. Is that is that accurate?

39:47You know, I haven't looked at that comparison between independent restaurants and between fast food restaurants. Yeah, not. But yeah, but I think that's a that's a fair case. And I think what franchises are trying to do is capture that small business labor model and then graft it to a large corporation. But make sure that all the rents go up, you know, to the shareholders and the top corporation and not not be shared with the workers, where if you're at a Starbucks or a Chipotle, which is totally corporate owned. I'm not saying they have great working conditions, but some of those rents do appear to be shared because wages are higher at Chipotle than Taco Bell and they're higher at Starbucks than at Dunkin' Donuts.

40:22And also Starbucks workers, even they don't have a contract yet, but they were able to at least vote for a union in a way that has never happened in fast food.

40:29Tracy Alloway:Can you explain the logic either like why companies aren't all franchises? So first of all, like why would a Chipotle, why did they not go down the franchise route? But why does McDonald's actually have a pretty significant number of owned and operated restaurants? Yeah. You know, so I think there's a there could be a few reasons for that. You know, one is owning the assets and employing the managers is there is a little bit more control that you get there than if then than if it's franchised. And particularly if you're not if you don't have the McDonald's model or McDonald's and Ray Kroc talks about this in his book.

41:01He really has a hammer over those franchisees in that if they lose that trademark, you can evict them from their own business because McDonald's owns the land. But if you're starting a chain now, you probably don't have the money to actually own all that real estate. So there is there. There are those those elements of it. But, yeah, I think there's and there's also there the Chipotle's or the Starbucks are a little bit more high end, you know, like a few cents more. It's not quite the same quality ingredients. It's just a little a little bit of a different model than the, you know, churn out high throughput, as low wages as possible model of a franchised fast food restaurant.

41:35You mentioned unions just then. And one of the interesting things in your book, I think it's maybe in the preface or something like that, but you talk about like the legal structure of a franchise, even if you wanted to unionize or negotiate with the franchisor, it's not entirely legally clear that you can do that because of the corporate structure. Is that right? Yeah, that's absolutely correct. Yeah. So the and this is something, again, that the franchisors were they were clear this is what they wanted to achieve with their business model. They didn't want to deal with unions up until, you know, the 20 teens and the 515.

42:11No one really thought that there was a way for workers who wanted to form a union to negotiate with McDonald's. But McDonald's could willingly do this at any point. But, you know, they choose not to. There's something called the Taft-Hartley Act, which is an anti-labor law from 1947 that makes it illegal for workers. You can't go on strike. You can't pick it. You can't target McDonald's Corporation. You can only target your immediate employer. So that creates enormous incentives. You know, franchising, not coincidentally, takes off after the Taft-Hartley Act. But during the Obama administration, they enacted something called a joint employer rule, which did make it possible for or made it easier for workers to say, you know, I really can't look at the realities of the situation, the economic realities.

42:48If I'm to get a raise or I'm going to get better working conditions, we need to bargain with McDonald's because they control the staffing levels. They control the supplies. They control what hours we operate and all that stuff. So that had under Obama, of course, it was overturned during Trump. It flipped back during Biden. Now it's flipped back. So it's just no one really knows their rights are. It's not. Yeah, it's a whole other issue that we could get into. But yeah, so there has been have been attempts to sort of fix that problem. But we have not fixed it yet.

43:14Tracy Alloway:From a sort of like broader public policy standpoint, I mean, my doorbell rings a lot or too much because it's a random like grocery deliveries and stuff like that. But like clearly the Amazon distribution logistic system that they built out, it's clearly more like rapid than the U.S. Postal Service, more flexible, I think, than UPS. UPS. How should we think about the sort of like the public benefit of this model that like has made it you can order all kinds of stuff and frequently have it delivered in an hour, which seems pretty nice. Plus, we do have McDonald's, which we also love. Yeah. Yeah.

43:54So first of all, there are benefits to the Amazon distribution model. And I think, yeah, we should acknowledge those for what they are. There are also costs. And, you know, we should we should make sure those are counted, too. You know, whether it's pollution neighborhoods where those distribution centers are or delivery centers, I should call them. There's the cost of workers, you know, famously peeing in bottle stores.

44:13Tracy Alloway:Can you just quickly say you distinguish between distribution centers and delivery centers? So the distribution centers are owned. Those are those are owned by Amazon. Yeah. So Amazon. But then they go to a delivery center before they go to your house. They don't. OK. Right. And that's where the. Yeah. And the delivery center is not owned by Amazon. The center is, but the trucking companies, they all go. So if you're a driver for these companies, you show up at an Amazon facility, you put on an Amazon uniform, you drive an Amazon truck, but your employer is one of these contractors. So, yeah, I think we should, first of all, we have to account for the cost on workers and other communities and all that kind of stuff.

44:51But also, I mean, my proposition for policy here is pretty simple, is that the problem is not that there's innovation, that there's control. That's what a firm is. That's what a corporation is, is, you know, markets shouldn't do everything. Sometimes having a little central planner, you know, a mini central planner, you know, coordinating activity is a great thing for, you know, getting more efficient and innovating. So we should have that. The problem is then you can't avoid the obligations and liabilities and risks that go with owning assets and employing workers. And we used to have, you know, our whole legal architecture for regulating and holding these companies accountable was based on that, like, archetype.

45:25You know, we pretty much only our wave of regulation, it was like 1935, you know, to the mid 1960s. and we know what a company is. It has a smokestack, it employs a bunch of workers, and it owns a factory. Like that's what a company is. Now with all of these, you know, and partly due to franchises creating this loophole, it's no longer so clear what an employer is. And all I would propose we do is, well, hey, if you want to direct and control the work of these drivers, well, look, you're their employer. And if you're not paying them the legal wages or if they want to bargain with you for a union or if, you know, because of you, because of your algorithm, them, they ran a red light and hit someone.

46:01Those are all those things you caused. You should be held responsible for those. All right, Brian Kalachi, we're going to have to leave it there. Thank you so much for coming on All Pots. Thank you. I had a great time.

46:23so joe that was a fascinating yeah conversation and um i'm really glad we ended up doing a franchise model because brian truly was the perfect guest but it's so interesting to hear I mean, it just kind of blows my mind, the have your cake and you get to aspect of all of this. Right.

46:42Tracy Alloway:No, totally. I mean, look, again, no one has to enter that. Like, right. Like to me, that's like one of the main things I did think is interesting that it really is literally about the intellectual property. Like that is literally what coming to America is about, is about a guy who commits intellectual property theft by making something that looks like a McDonald's. But that is the core thing. That's it. You know, most people aren't going to be able to manufacture that, etc. So being able to plug into that. No, I thought it was like really interesting, the history. I am not surprised at all. The Ray Kroc book is so good.

47:17Tracy Alloway:He's so forthright. He's so unselfconscious about everything that he did in life. It's just like a very like weird and fun read for that purpose alone. I'm going to have to read it. But I kind of want to read the Colonel Sanders one first. It's so funny to hear Colonel Sanders. and it's like Ray Kroc and Colonel Sanders. It's like, wait, that's a... It still feels like that's just like a made-up character. Really? Yeah, to me it does. I mean, I knew who was real, but it still feels like that's a real person. Do you know about the whole KFC Christmas thing in Japan? Oh, they're really into it, but other than that...

47:50Yeah, I think it's because Colonel Sanders kind of looked a little bit like Santa.

47:56Tracy Alloway:Oh, interesting. So a lot of the Japanese KFCs, at least when I was there, They used to have like big statues of Colonel Sanders out. That's amazing. And it was kind of like, you know. That's great. Very American, very Western. That's a great avatar of American, you know, both cultural and business traditions of Colonel Sanders. I do think like, you know, I always found it weird when the marketing for being an Uber driver or like starting a van line was like either like be your own boss or like start your own business. It's like maybe like the math. Look, the left tail is reduced and the right tail is reduced.

48:34Tracy Alloway:So there's maybe, you know, and clearly people have done well entering franchise, but they do not look anything like what we typically think of as like, quote, entrepreneurship is business ownership. It's like a very it's clearly a very different thing. No, that tension is also remarkable. The idea that like you're an entrepreneur, you're independent, but also the franchisor is going to dictate basically everything to you. I also just think I like that. Except wage costs. Except wage costs. I like that Brian brought up like, you know, even the most like UChicago schooled economists is like, no, it's really good.

49:08Tracy Alloway:And there are a lot of efficiency gains when you do a lot of activity under a centrally planned umbrella, such as a large corporation and the sort of like thing that hardly anyone talks about, which is like how much of the economy is literally under central planning. We just don't call it central planning because it's corporate. Yeah. I mean, yes, there are clearly some benefits to it. Yeah, yeah. Both you and I, it sounds, I think you use Amazon Prime, do you? I do, yes. Yeah, so do I. And McDonald's, of course. Okay, shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast.

49:40I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

49:43Tracy Alloway:And I'm Jill Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our guest, Brian Kalachi. He's at Brian underscore Kalachi. Follow our producers, Kerman Rodriguez at Kerman Armand. Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot. Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. You can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash OddLots. And if you enjoyed this conversation, if you like it when we talk about how IP underpins the franchise fast food model, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform.

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