McDonald's, Mustard, Mowing and Money

Hello Again from the Mensch.  Technically, my handle is Money Mensch but today I am feeling less Money-y and More Mensch-y.

What do McDonald’s, Mustard, and Mowing have in common?  Not much, but then a lot.  For one thing, it combines three different topics that I could write at length about, three topics that each would have become their own post, but I am far too tired now and have far too much other things to write about than those three things.  Also, each of those three things has come into play for Yours Truly since I last posted.

McDonald’s

I had a much-anticipated meeting earlier this week at Hamburger University or Hamburger U for short.  For those of you who have not heard of this, Hamburger U is a 130,000-square-foot training facility of McDonald's, located in Oak Brook, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. 

This corporate university was designed to instruct personnel employed by McDonald's in the various aspects of restaurant management. More than 80,000 restaurant managers, mid-managers and owner/operators have graduated from this facility.  Since its establishment Hamburger University has been situated on an 80 acre campus. Restaurant employees receive approximately 32 hours of training in their first month with McDonald's and more than 5,000 students attend Hamburger University each year. Founder Ray Kroc oversaw lessons at its beginning (Wikipedia).  

My view approaching Hamburger U last week

Let me tell you.  From looking at the Oak Brook campus of Hamburger U, one would not be surprised to learn that it was a corporate center for a high-tech company or some other multi-billion dollar corporation listed in the S&P 500.  Obviously, McDonald’s is no slouch and is one of the biggest of the big.  It’s just that if you were to eat a cheap burger, fries and drink at your local Mickey D’s, you would not expect the company’s executives to meet in such splendor as may be more befitting for a Google, Apple or Microsoft.

The interior of Hamburger U is impeccable 

The funniest thing of all about my meeting with others with strong interest in the Chicago industrial real estate market is that there was no McDonald’s food to be had.  It was catered with what I would call "real food."  But we did have unrestricted access to their coffee machines scattered throughout the facility so I certainly consumed enough coffee where it would have cost me four or five bucks, like one fancy Starbucks drink would.

I may not have landed another industrial project for my town, but I sure did enjoy perusing Hamburger U’s campus, which will soon be relocated to Chicago.

One of many Ronald McDonald statues at Hamburber U

Considering that the vast majority of people will never have the opportunity to visit or attend Hamburger U, I snapped a few photos and about a minute of video to share with you.

Mustard

After working about ten hours per day both Monday and Tuesday, rendering me too tired and stressed to even pound out a few hundred words those nights, I worked about nine hours on Wednesday before heading up north to Middleton, Wisconsin on Wednesday night.

After driving for about three hours in pounding rain, I checked into the Comfort Suites in Middleton on Wednesday night right before 11:00 PM.  Being the light sleeper that I am and someone who never sleeps well in a hotel the first night, I caught maybe two hours of sleep while listening to the cooling unit rattle on and off all night. 

I attended a fairly interesting conference that could generate many posts on its own or perhaps even an entire book.  The topic was on real estate development and redevelopment and included many strategies and examples of financing and incentivizing large projects.

But the coolest thing besides me beating a drunk and boisterous millennial who challenged me to arm wrestling four consecutive times was my visit to the National Mustard Museum.

I visited and patronized the National Mustard Museum yesterday

Part of being a Jewish mensch is that I cannot and will not consume mayonnaise.  I do not wish to go on at length about it, but suffice it to say that Jewish mensches do not consume mayo.

But I love mustard.  Love is a gross understatement.  I absolutely, positively love and adore mustard.

Thus, after attending a seminar on real estate development for two days, including having gained quite a few insights into the hotel development business, I headed to this Shangri-La of mustard.  As another side not, this seminar was very timely for me, having met with a hotel developer for nearly two hours this past Wednesday afternoon and then having spelled out my strategy for incentivizing the development until about 5:30 with the bosses.

Some day, I sincerely hope to write about how I helped attract a hotel or hotels to the community that has employed me for thirteen years this month.

Two of my millennial buddies purchasing mustard

After the two days of commiserating with my economic development brothers and sisters, eating well in Middleton and hanging out with three millennials plus one other Gen Xer like me on Thursday night, I headed to the main place where I wanted to visit.

Words and pictures cannot do this place justice.  I could have spent hours there viewing, sampling and talking about mustard.  But in the interest of leaving and driving back home, the kind and patient lady there helped me select a gift box sampler with eight smaller bottles for about twenty-five bucks.  

She also encouraged and invited me to attend their National Mustard Day celebration on August 4^th, something that I told my son about last night and I think that we are going to go. 

My non-Jewish wife does not eat mustard but supports my and our son’s love of it.  Our daughter is just starting to appreciate it and has volunteered to make some soft pretzels for us tomorrow to sample the mustards with.

How anyone could not love mustard is beyond my understanding. 

Mowing

I have not mowed yet.  Yes, my lawn grew quickly this past week as it rained for several days and the temperature rose.  It is becoming a little unruly.

Relating this to money, the prevailing wisdom is that if your time is better spent on something more financially worthwhile to you, then it is okay to pay others for services such as mowing, auto repair, painting your rooms, plumbing repairs etc.

For my brother’s case, this is simple math.  He could better spend an hour working on writing a motion for discovery on a case that might ultimately net him thirty grand or a hundred grand or, like a new case that he is working on, a million dollars or more.  To resolve a case in which he nets fifty grand might take him a hundred hours of work when it comes to meetings, court hearings, interviewing experts, traveling, paying court fees and the like.  So it is not a straight hourly pay like I have and you may have.  The fifty grand that he clears on the case may work out to five hundred per hour, so you can easily understand why he might not want to spend one of those hours mowing his lawn.

Ironically, my wealthiest relatives and my best friend have tiny city lot lawns that you could mow in five to ten minutes tops and could even do it without a gas-powered motor.  My sister and her husband have a house in Uptown New Orleans with a lawn less than a tenth the size of mine and their house is approaching a million dollars in value.  Ditto my best friend who has a house a few blocks away from Lake Michigan in Evanston.  His lawn is about the size of a postage stamp although his property value is roughly three times that of mine. 

My successful uncle and aunt have a huge backyard but can easily pay a landscaping service to take care of everything without missing the funds at all.

Me, I hired a lawn mowing service for years and then had to take care of it myself starting two years ago when my guy never returned any calls or texts after many tries and my grass growing high enough to earn a citation.  A guy of Mexican descent with all Spanish-speaking workers, I do not know what happened to him or his small business, but I have my suspicions.

How that affects me today is that my grass grew fairly high over the past week as I did business at Hamburger U, worked from 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, worked from 8:30 to 5:30 on Wednesday before driving to Wisconsin, and then in Cheese Land the past two days.

With our son staying over at his college and our daughter staying over at her BFF’s house last night, my wife and I had better things to do than me working on a post.  Plus, I only slept a total of four hours the two nights at the hotel and was beyond wiped out after this past week and about a half hour of private time.

Thus, when the Old Maid neighbor who assumed ownership of her late mother’s home right behind ours about a year ago muttered “Mow Your Lawn” to me as I walked into our house, a lot of things raced through my mind.

One was that I worked many hours the past few weeks and just got back into town last night and then watched one of our neighbor’s dogs for a few hours last night.  Despite being just a regular middle aged middle class guy, I am extremely busy these days, very stressed out and – oh yeah, by the way, I paid about five grand worth of things in the past three days, half of which went to our son’s college.

It is good to be busy and highly engaged with many things but, truth be told, I could use a break and some “me time.”

So even though my family has been spending a lot lately and I am one of the worst property maintainers in our neighborhood that straddles working class and lower middle class families, I do not feel it worth my time to mow my yard today.

What I did instead was texted someone who mowed my lawn the final time last year and left a flyer in my door that he would mow and do assorted other landscaping services for twenty-five to forty per week depending on what he does.

He was glad to get my text and said that he will come by and mow next Tuesday.  His business model is that he will stick an invoice in your door at the end of every month and accepts cash only.  Does he dutifully report all mowing and landscaping income on his return every year?  I do not know and, since my name is not yet on this, I do not give a flying fuck.  I don’t know if any of Ignacio’s guys were here legally and did not care for the six years that he serviced our yard.  All I know is that I did not have to waste half of my day working on lawn care.  I may be a long-time suburbanite, but that does not take the City boy out of me.  I fucking hate lawn care.  Sorry for the two F-bombs, but I feel strongly about it.

Funny thing is, I was contemplating telling our back yard neighbor that I have a guy coming Tuesday to mow, but now that she rudely said what she did, I feel that it is none of her effing business (that’s better than dropping a third F-bomb).

Wrapping it together

You can easily find at least a million blog posts about #FIRE, but this may be the first and only post in history about Hamburger U, the Mustard Museum and mowing.  And for good reason.

But what they all have in common, besides being elements of my past long, tiring and expensive week is that they all do have to do with money.

The campus that I visited is worth billions and yet the biggest fast food corporation on earth is going to leave it for the City. 

All the conversations that I had with industrial brokers and investors had one common element and you know what it is.

When they ask you what land is selling for, how rents are trending and what the cap rates are, they are all just thinking about making more of that one thing.  The same thing that keeps them living in high style, purchasing new Mercedes, Land Cruisers and Teslas every year and vacationing at second or third homes while I am taking orders from a millennial on a snowy day in the Chicago suburbs.

In Middleton, all I did was spend.  Four hundred bucks for two nights lodging, fifteen or so bucks per lunch, twenty bucks for dinner, ten bucks for a few beers, ten more bucks for tipping the shuttle driver a few times and the twenty-eight or whatever that I spent on Mustard plus a magnet.  

Oh yeah, and I paid about six hundred for the two-day conference, all to gain continuing education credits.

All told, over a grand was spent on my two-day stay in Middleton.  About nine hundred of it is reimbursable through my job.  Only the beer, mustard and tips are on my dime.

I had a great lunch at Dickey's Barbecue Pit on Thursday

With the mowing, I will gladly stop by the ATM on the way home from work and withdraw an extra hundred or hundred and fifty bucks from it to pay a guy who lives two blocks down from me cash for mowing my lawn.

My so-called “extra” time may not prove as profitable as my brother’s or a writer whose words are sure to generate extra income.

But that does not mean that I should not aspire to make my time more valuable.

You will see less of these diary-like posts in the near future, although I am sure that I will still feel compelled to share some personal info from time to time.  But if you see things like “How to…” or “Ten things about…” or “This is the best [insert product here],” you will know that I am writing clickbait, using SEO and writing a “chapter” or “section” in a “book,” i.e. a self-published eBook.

Gotta go…after that long week, heavy spending and the mountain of work and tasks waiting for me on Monday, I am going to be a great father and husband today and do something on the “Honey Do” list.  I am a big believer in the “Happy Wife, Happy Life” philosophy and if my wife was so willing to be so nice to me, I will now do the same.

It’s not always easy being a mensch.