4 Thoughts for Saturday 3-1-25

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Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast 4 min 1 speaker 5 chapters transcribed

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What are Scott's four thoughts for Saturday?

0:00

This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Today's discussion is four thoughts for Saturday. And bear with me on these four different thoughts that have come in very different directions. So the first thought is, I was recently in Park City this weekend, Park City, Utah. And there's so many thoughts that come out of that.

What challenges does Park City face with explosive growth?

0:19

But the thing that struck me the most was, here's a town that's enjoying explosive growth. And that's a good thing that there's explosive growth. The bad thing is, in trying to park a car Saturday night, or it wasn't Saturday, it was Thursday night in Park City, it was impossible to do so, literally impossible to do so. So it led us out of Park City to go someplace else to eat that night and have a drink that night. And I think it's really a fascinating situation. When developers take over and there's no check on development, things go haywire. And that's what you're seeing in Park City. Park City is one of my favorite places in the world. Park City, Deer Valley.

How does development impact local communities?

0:54

But currently, even though skiing is overall wonderful, even though one of my buddies skis too fast and ended up in the hospital, it's a situation where Park City was almost a total disaster on Thursday night. And I think it's going to, quite frankly, get worse. I can't even imagine what it's like during spring break week and spring break month. But what a disaster. And the opposite right now of sort of the travel publicity or the local travel publicity for Park City, because it was literally a disaster on Friday and this week. There was a crowding in town. That's a salute to zoning and to letting developers take a little bit of a chin and not going crazy with so much development. The second thing we'll talk about today is how do you end up in certain places?

1:39

In today's discussion, it's Chicago's North Shore, where there's only so many good restaurants to go to. You keep on rotating to the same restaurants, and how do you end up just naturally with favorites and places you want to go? And the question is, Why aren't there more small, good little places to go to?

Why are there fewer small restaurants in Chicago's North Shore?

1:57

And what happens is, economically, it becomes very hard to survive in some of these small little places. My favorite small little place is on the North Shore, probably in the 30 years I've lived there, is this wine bar that used to be there. But again, it couldn't survive on the small traffic. One of the problems with the suburbs, other kinds of places is,

What happens to small businesses in suburban areas?

2:13

They end up having a very hard time with small places surviving and thriving. We've got a number of great small coffee shops, retards, hometown, and others. But in terms of restaurants, there's five to seven great restaurants. I put the Abigail's right at the top of that. I love Pomeroy. I love a few other places. But there are very few great places. We spend time at Happen and Little Ricky's, too. I'm the only person in the family that would go to Little Ricky's. But it used to be called Little Ricky's. Now it's called Little Honeycomb. But the same concept is true. There's only X amount of places that people really like going to and the ones that you really love, whether it be a barbecue or the place, the wine bar, all seem to get closed down over time. So that's the second thought of the day. The third thought of the day is dentistry.

2:54

And again, whenever I comment on dentistry, I feel like Charles Barkley commenting on San Antonio and the big woman there, and he offends somebody. But dentistry has become one of the great records in our society. You go to the dentist, and they're always trying to push you on the x-rays and the extra services. The dentist comes in for about 10 seconds to make sure that the dentist can bill. Well, the dental hygienist, the one that I go to, I love the dental hygienist. She's just fantastic. The least painful, makes it the easiest thing to get through, and so forth. But dentistry has become a complete racket. We're always looking for more ways to rack up the bill with less work. And I think it's fascinating.