Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 802

In 2017, the US restaurant industry generated about $560 billion in annual revenue. By comparison, the movie industry generates some $30 billion a year. Food, and eating out, is a big business.

A recent paper by Joel Waldgogel of the University of Minnesota has tried to estimate the "implicit cuisine trade" associated with this industry. To do this, he used restaurant data from TripAdvisor and sales figures from Euromonitor.

Domestic consumption of a foreign cuisine was considered an "import." And foreign consumption of a domestic cuisine was considered an "export." Here's what he discovered (graph from the Economist ):

Italy is, by far, the biggest net "exporter." And the US is the biggest net "importer." If you exclude fast food, the US "deficit" balloons to approximately $140 billion.

I guess everybody does really love Italian food. For the full paper, click here .

Last week, SHARE NOW -- which was previously known as Car2Go -- announced that it will be exiting the North American market entirely come February 29, 2020, and that it will also cease operations in London, Brussels, and Florence. A couple of reasons were cited , including the "volatile state of the global mobility landscape," but that really translates into low adoption:

Further, despite our best efforts and investments in Brussels, London and Florence over the years, we are unable to continue operations in a manner that’s sustainable for our business due to low adoption rates.

Moving forward, SHARE NOW will focus on the remaining 18 European cities. We, along with our shareholders, believe these markets show the clearest potential for profitable growth and mobility innovation.

There was a period of time when I used to use Car2Go here in Toronto. My network did as well. But that quickly stopped with the rise of Uber and Lyft. I mean, why bother finding a Car2Go and then parking it, when there's a much lower friction option? I would imagine that's how most people feel. (Maybe there's a care share advantage for longer trips.)

At the same time, companies such as Uber and Lyft have, as you know, not performed well as public companies. The market is nervous about their path to profitability. In my view, they're largely an undifferentiated offering right now, and it's pretty easy to switch across them. So yeah, I guess the global mobility landscape is pretty volatile.

Software businesses are generally high margin businesses. But along with this feature comes some risks. Here's an excerpt from a recent post by Scott Galloway (which is actually about FedEx):

With any software start-up, there is a non-zero probability that you wake up the next day and find that a better-resourced firm (Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe) has deployed 200 engineers to copy your product, bundle it with their stack for free, or near free, and … welcome to zero. I believe this is happening to Slack, but more slowly than Netscape, as Microsoft’s General Counsel has likely coached Satya to charge a nominal fee for Teams and let Slack bleed out, instead of putting a bullet in its head and stirring the DOJ from a 3-Ambien slumber.

Real estate, by comparison, doesn't get disrupted in quite the same way. A location/city can lose its economic purpose ( Great Grimsby is just one example), but as long as there are growth tailwinds the real estate should do well.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has on many occasions written about how he (and his firm) made a fortune in the dot-com era, only to lose it all and have to remake it again over the subsequent decades.

One the lessons learned from that experience (according to his blog ), was to take some of that second tech fortune and invest it into hard assets -- namely real estate. That feels right to me.