Food Franchise Quotes

The life's work of Walt Disney and Ray Kroc had come full-circle, uniting in perfect synergy. McDonald's began to sell its hamburgers and french fries at Disney's theme parks. The ethos of McDonaldland and of Disneyland, never far apart, have finally become one. Now you can buy a Happy Meal at the Happiest Place on Earth.

First, from this side of the twentieth century, après strip malls, fast-food franchises, glass boxes, housing projects, and other architectural gaffes, it’s fun to look back on this dilemma of to-column-or-not-to-column, because honestly, the only question most Americans ask about a new building at this point is basically: Is it a soul-sucking eyesore of cheap-ass despair? It’s not? Whew.

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ― its DNA ― xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a lef- turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines. In olden times, you’d wander down to Mom’s Café for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn’t recognize. If you did enough traveling, you’d never feel at home anywhere. But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald’s and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald’s is Home, condensed into a three-ringed binder and xeroxed. “No surprises” is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin. The people of America, who live in the world’s most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto.

Many of the critiques and responses to the impact of fast food on communities of color focus solely on food and not the infrastructure that surrounds food systems.

and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness. She scoured Nigerian websites, Nigerian pro files on Facebook, Nigerian blogs, and each click brought yet another story of a young person who had recently moved back home, clothed in American or British degrees, to start an investment company, a music production business, a fashion label, a magazine, a fast-food franchise She looked at photographs of these men and women and felt the dull ache of loss, as though they had prised open her hand and taken some thing of hers. They were living her life.

Oh, right. I doubt this place has any delicious, fattening fast-food places, and maybe the Imperium doesn’t either. Yup, no McDonald’s, no Burger King, no Gino’s Pizza… Dear God, have I made a mistake coming here? I may be of small stature, but make no mistake: I am a glutton. On the other hand – possible franchise opportunity.

In olden times, you'd wander down to Mom's Cafe for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your home-own. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn't recognize. If you did enough traveling, you'd never feel at home anywhere. But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald's and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald's is Home, condensed into a three-ring binder and xeroxed. “No surprises” is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin. The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles; Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bungee jumping. They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture.

To be a software developer was to run the rest stops off the exits and to make sure that all the fast-food and gas station franchises accorded with each other and with user expectations; to be a hardware specialist was to lay the infrastructure, to grade and pave the roads themselves; while to be a network specialist was to be responsible for traffic control, manipulating signs and lights to safely route the time-crunched hordes to their proper destinations. To get into systems, however, was to be an urban planner, to take all of the components available and ensure their interaction to maximum effect. It was, pure and simple, like getting paid to play God, or at least a tinpot dictator.

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder -- its DNA -- Xerox(tm) it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines. In olden times, you'd wander down to Mom's Cafe for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn't recognize. If you did enough traveling, you'd never feel at home anywhere. But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald's and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald's is Home, condensed into a three-ring binder and xeroxed. "No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin. The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles, Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bun-gee jumping. They have parallelparked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture. The only ones left in the city are street people, feeding off debris; immigrants, thrown out like shrapnel from the destruction of the Asian powers; young bohos; and the technomedia priesthood of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong. Young smart people like Da5id and Hiro, who take the risk of living in the city because they like stimulation and they know they can handle it.

You are claiming that the Soviet authorities began and influenced the existence of the Democratic Party [in Iran]. That is the basis of all your statements. The simplest way to discredit your absurd claim si to tell you about Iran, of which you are apparently ignorant. The people of Iran are oppressed, poverty-stricken, and miserable with hunger and disease. Their death rate is among the highest in the world, and their infant mortality rate threatens Iran with complete extinction. They are ruled without choice by feudalistic landowners, ruthless Khans, and venal industrialists. The peasants are slaves and the workers are paid a few pennies for a twelve hour day--not enough to keep their families in food. I can quote you all the figures you like to support these statements, quote them if necessary from British sources. I can also quote you the figures of wealth which is taken out of Iran yearly by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, of which the British Governemtn is the largest shareholder. 200 million pounds sterling have been taken out of Iran by your Oil company: a hundred times the total amount of Iran's national income and ten thousand times the total national income of the working people of Iran. By such natural resources as oil, Iran is by nature one of the wealthiest countries on earth. That wealth goes to Britain, while Iran remains poverty-ridden and without economic stability at all. It has no wage policies, no real trade unions, few hospitals, no sanitation and drainage, no irrigation, no proper housing, and no adequate road system. Its people have no rights before the law; their franchise in non-existent, and their parliamentary rights are destroyed by the corrupt method of election and political choice. The Iranian people suffer the terrors of a police regime, and they are prey to the manipulations of the grain speculators and the money operators. The racial minorities suffer discrimination and intolerance, and religious minorities are persecuted for political ends. Banditry threatens the mountain districts, and British arms have been used to support one tribe against another. I could go on indefinitely, painting you a picture of misery and starvation and imprisonment and subjection which must shame any human being capable of hearing it. Yet you say that the existence of a Democratic Party in Iran has been created by the Soviet authorities. You underestimate the Iranian people, Lord Essex! The Democratic Party has arisen out of all this misery and subjection as a force against corruption and oppression. Until now the Iranian people have been unable to create a political party because the police system prevented by terror and assassination. Any attempt to organize the workers and peasants was quickly halted by the execution of party leaders and the vast imprisonment of its followers. The Iranian people, however, have a long record of struggle and persistence, and they do not have to be told by the Soviet Union where their interests lie. They are not stupid and they are not utterly destroyed. They still posses the will to organize a democratic body and follow it into paths of Government. The Soviet Union has simply made sure that the police assassins did not interfere.... To talk of our part in 'creating' the democratic movement is an insult to the people and a sign of ignorance. We do not underestimate the Iranian people, and as far as we are concerned the Democratic Party...belongs to the people. It is their creation and their right, and it cannot be broken by wild charges which accuse the Soviet Union of its birth. We did not create it, and we have not interfered in the affairs of Iran. On the contrary, it is the British Government which has interfered continuously and viciously in Iran's affairs.

Here were professional athletes, making millions of dollars, and they had no food to eat in the dressing room after killing themselves for 60 minutes on a game night. And once they got on the plane, they got a brick of mac-and-cheese and a cold ham sandwich. They didn’t have enough sticks to go around some days. They didn’t have t-shirts or hats to wear back home, or while talking on camera to reporters. The Chicago Blackhawks weren’t deemed the worst franchise in professional sports by ESPN in 2004 for nothing.

Egg franchise sector is projected to grow at 10% in coming five years The growth of egg franchise sector in India will be increased due to urbanization, changing lifestyle and consumption pattern. Moreover, people demand more luxurious outlets to enjoy with friends and families while eating delicious egg dishes. A plethora of new egg franchise establishments have contributed towards massive development of egg industry. As per experts, the sector is estimated to grow at 10% in forthcoming years may become leading sector to attract more investors. There are numerous evolving trends in egg industry that are contributing to generating futuristic opportunities. Indore based start-up egg franchise brand, Andeywala has produced amazing business model to provide better infrastructure facilities at low investment. Now it becomes easy to start new business with Andeywala. Besides this, sector is expected to provide employment to millions of people, an increased number of egg restaurants will require employees. Tier 1 and tier 2 cities are crowded with food franchises but none of them exclusively egg dishes.

the inability to ameliorate the soul-destroying visual discord of corporate fast-food franchises. Some acquaintance or another would periodically drag me into one of the horrors, and, under the malign influence of a décor scheme that assaulted my retinas with primary colors,

Soul food, it would seem, depends on an ineffable quality. It is a combination of nostalgia for and pride in the food of those who came before. In the manner of the Negro spiritual “How I Got Over,” soul food looks back at the past and celebrates a genuine taste palate while offering more than a nod to the history of disen-franchisement of blacks in the United States.

So I think people are now starting to make a lot of money out of owning patents.Trademarks, of course, have always made people a lot of money. A trademark system is a wonderful thing for a big operation if it's well known. The exclusive franchise can also be wonderful. If there were only three television channels awarded in a big city and you owned one of them, there were only so many hours a day that you could be on. So you had a natural position in an oligopoly in the pre-cable days. And if you get the franchise for the only food stand in an airport, you have a captive clientele, and you have a small monopoly of a sort.

Who wants to argue that consumer culture, whether it’s fast food or franchised movies or duty-free cosmetics, is wholesome and beneficial? If people do not start out as imbeciles, they are made imbecilic by the corporate contours of their daily life, lulled into a sleep, a sleep which, according to Debord, prevents them from wanting a more authentic life. True enough.

Norwich station has your standard late-Victorian brick, cast-iron, and glass shed retrofitted with the bright molded plastic of various fast-food franchises. I gratefully staggered in the direction of Upper Crust and considered asking if I could stick my head under their coffee spigot but settled for a couple of double espressos and a chicken tikka masala baguette instead.

But it isn’t the fun of DIY invention, urban exploration, physical danger, and civil disorder that the Z-Boys enjoyed in 1976. It is fun within serious limits, and for all of its thrills it is (by contrast) scripted. And rather obedient. The fact that there are public skateparks and high-performance skateboards signals progress: America has embraced this sport, as it did bicycles in the nineteenth century. Towns want to make skating safe and acceptable. The economy has more opportunity to grow. America is better off for all of this. Yet such government and commercial intervention in a sport that was born of radical liberty means that the fun itself has changed; it has become mediated. For the skaters who take pride in their flashy store-bought equipment have already missed the Z-Boys’ joke: Skating is a guerrilla activity. It’s the fun of beating, not supporting, the system. P. T. Barnum said it himself: all of business is humbug. How else could business turn a profit, if it didn’t trick you with advertising? If it didn’t hook you with its product? This particular brand of humbug was perfected in the late 1960s, when merchandise was developed and marketed and sold to make Americans feel like rebels. Now, as then, customers always pay for this privilege, and purveyors keep it safe (and generally clean) to curb their liability. They can’t afford customers taking real risks. Plus it’s bad for business to encourage real rebellion. And yet, marketers know Americans love fun—they have known this for centuries. And they know that Americans, especially kids, crave autonomy and participation, so they simulate the DIY experience at franchises like the Build-A-Bear “workshops,” where kids construct teddy bears from limited options, or “DIY” restaurants, where customers pay to grill their own steaks, fry their own pancakes, make their own Bloody Marys. These pay-to-play stores and restaurants are, in a sense, more active, more “fun,” than their traditional competition: that’s their big selling point. But in both cases (as Barnum knew) the joke is still on you: the personalized bear is a standardized mishmash, the personalized food is often inedible. As Las Vegas knows, the house always wins. In the history of radical American fun, pleasure comes from resistance, risk, and participation—the same virtues celebrated in the “Port Huron Statement” and the Digger Papers, in the flapper’s slang and the Pinkster Ode. In the history of commercial amusement, most pleasures for sale are by necessity passive. They curtail creativity and they limit participation (as they do, say, in a laser-tag arena) to a narrow range of calculated surprises, often amplified by dazzling technology. To this extent, TV and computer screens, from the tiny to the colossal, have become the scourge of American fun. The ubiquity of TV screens in public spaces (even in taxicabs and elevators) shows that such viewing isn’t amusement at all but rather an aggressive, ubiquitous distraction. Although a punky insurgency of heedless satire has stung the airwaves in recent decades—from equal-opportunity offenders like The Simpsons and South Park to Comedy Central’s rabble-rousing pundits, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert—the prevailing “fun” of commercial amusement puts minimal demands on citizens, besides their time and money. TV’s inherent ease seems to be its appeal, but it also sends a sobering, Jumbotron-sized message about the health of the public sphere.

EARNINGS McDonald's Plans Marketing Push as Profit Slides By Julie Jargon | 436 words Associated Press The burger giant has been struggling to maintain relevance among younger consumers and fill orders quickly in kitchens that have grown overwhelmed with menu items. McDonald's Corp. plans a marketing push to emphasize its fresh-cooked breakfasts as it battles growing competition for the morning meal. Competition at breakfast has heated up recently as Yum Brands Inc.'s Taco Bell entered the business with its new Waffle Taco last month and other rivals have added or discounted breakfast items. McDonald's Chief Executive Don Thompson said it hasn't yet noticed an impact from Taco Bell's breakfast debut, but that the overall increased competition "forces us to focus even more on being aggressive in breakfast." Mr. Thompson's comments came after McDonald's on Tuesday reported that its profit for the first three months of 2014 dropped 5.2% from a year earlier, weaker than analysts' expectations. Comparable sales at U.S. restaurants open more than a year declined 1.7% for the quarter and 0.6% for March, the fifth straight month of declines in the company's biggest market. Global same-store sales rose 0.5% for both the quarter and month. Mr. Thompson acknowledged again that the company has lost relevance with some customers and needs to strengthen its menu offerings. He emphasized Tuesday that McDonald's is focused on stabilizing key markets, including the U.S., Germany, Australia and Japan. The CEO said McDonald's has dominated the fast-food breakfast business for 35 years, and "we don't plan on giving that up." The company plans in upcoming ads to inform customers that it cooks its breakfast, unlike some rivals. "We crack fresh eggs, grill sausage and bacon," Mr. Thompson said. "This is not a microwave deal." Beyond breakfast, McDonald's also plans to boost marketing of core menu items such as Big Macs and french fries, since those core products make up 40% of total sales. To serve customers more quickly, the chain is working to optimize staffing, and is adding new prep tables that let workers more efficiently add new toppings when guests want to customize orders. McDonald's also said it aims to sell more company-owned restaurants outside the U.S. to franchisees. Currently, 81% of its restaurants around the world are franchised. Collecting royalties from franchisees provides a stable source of income for a restaurant company and removes the cost of operating them. McDonald's reported a first-quarter profit of $1.2 billion, or $1.21 a share, down from $1.27 billion, or $1.26 a share, a year earlier. The company partly attributed the decline to the effect of income-tax benefits in the prior year. Total revenue for the quarter edged up 1.4% to $6.7 billion, though costs rose faster, at 2.3%. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters forecast earnings of $1.24 a share on revenue of $6.72 billion.

Right now in Harlem, for every bank and chicken wing franchise joint, there is a small business owner who has spent a decade trying to figure out how to cater to a neighborhood he has fallen in love with. For every man or woman who has succumbed to that spell, I want to tell them: Go for it, do it. I want to pass the word like gospel. Let me tell you something: Right now in Harlem authorship is on the move. This is ours, we tell each other. We have made it, chopped it, cooked it, played it. This is our story. Gordon Parks, photographer, musicians, writer, film director paved a way for us. Bear witness, he told us. That was his gift to the neighborhood. Whatever goes down, whatever turns up - make food and music and dance and story out of it. Right now and since forever, the world keeps telling us there's only room for one: Serena and that's it. Toni and that's it. I wonder if they can hear Harlem across the divide. Come one, come all. That's how we wrestle with urban renewal, black removal. The church ladies know this, and so do the hustlers. Right now in Harlem, we don't shy away from the ugly; we don't bow our heads to what's beautiful. We just keep asking, how does all this new s**t fit with the old? Right now in Harlem there's room; there's hope; there's inspiration; there's good food. I may not be able to explain the magic, but it is there. To be in Harlem and make it takes luck, but nobody told me different. One thing is certain, wherever you are, you should come to Harlem - right now.

Back in Springdale, Don Tyson focused almost exclusively on the McDonald’s account for long stretches of time. As he explained it to Jim Blair and Joe Fred Starr, Don planned to piggyback on McDonald’s franchise system to bring processed chicken to every street corner. In his estimation, McDonald’s had the best distribution system of any fast-food franchise in the country, and that’s what drew him to the company. Rather than deliver Tyson’s product to several depots of refrigerated warehouses, Tyson could deliver to just one location: the McDonald’s distribution center. Then the restaurant chain would use its own trucks to ship the product out to its network of stores.

public schools are now the biggest franchise food operation in the world. The School Nutrition Association is the biggest proponent of processed food—

Not only do you get a chance to get out of Hawksburg again to start up the franchise, but Finn’s heaven sent. He could kick-start our food to the next level. I know you’re ready to stop treading water.” Treading water. Heaven sent. Finn had been in town less than two days, and already people thought he was more valuable to Honey and Hickory than she was. Lyndsey leaned both elbows on the prep table and turned to Simone, eyes bright. “Do you think he can teach me how to flambé? I’ve always wanted to try.” Of course he could. He could teach them to fillet a halibut, or make a red wine reduction. But what did that matter at Honey and Hickory? “You planning to flambé a pork butt?” Lyndsey shook her head. “Then it’s a moot point. Finn’s here to help with the reception dinner—that’s it.” Brows raised, Lyndsey said, “Heard.

one of the first moves from the Trump administration was to reverse the Obama NLRB decision on franchise joint employment. The majority of workers in American fast food come from the same white, working-class pool of voters who went overwhelmingly for Trump, a man whose campaign was dominated by promises to fight for the (white) working class and punish immigrants. When I spoke with her after the 2016 election, Bridget connected Trump’s election to the urgency of Stand Up KC’s cross-racial organizing: “Kind of the whole point of this movement is for white workers to understand that racism affects white workers as well. Because it keeps us divided from our Black and our brown brothers and sisters. So, we need to understand that as white workers, we, too, need to stand up and fight against racism.

This strategy was central to AFP’s role in Koch’s political network. From the earliest days of AFP’s inception, the group operated as something like a fast-food franchise. AFP was composed of semiautonomous state chapters, but all of them served products from the same menu. The menu was designed with great care and specificity by Charles and David Koch and their lieutenants in Koch’s lobbying operations. This meant that state-level directors had a lot of autonomy. Lonegan developed his own pool of local donors and had the freedom to hire his own field directors and to determine where he spoke. But ultimately Lonegan and other state directors were told by AFP headquarters what they should say and how they should say it. “I had to report to the national office,” Lonegan recalled. “They gave guidance on where our issues would lie. . . . So, I would report regularly to my boss on what issues were emerging, and then we’d determine how they’d want to address it. Not every issue that I saw as an issue did they think was an issue.” This blend of local autonomy with centralized control created a political organization that was uniquely powerful and effective. AFP could mobilize the type of popular citizen involvement that most people referred to as grassroots support. But it coupled this popular support with intelligence and guidance developed inside one of the most well-funded corporate lobbying operations in America. This meant that AFP could get people marching in the streets, and it could get them marching in the exact streets and zip codes of congressional districts where their marching would most effectively benefit Koch Industries’ strategic interests.

The president of the United States is like a manager at a fast food restaurant. He seems to be the one in charge and the one who takes the brunt of customer complaints, but he is merely working for someone who the customers will never see, or never hear about. The fast food manager is working for the franchise owner, just as the president of the United States is simply a spokesman who is carrying out the orders and agenda of his boss which remains unseen by the public. This boss, is of course, the Illuminati.

If you're searching for a lucrative food franchise opportunity that combines low investment and high-profit potential, The Rolling Plate's cloud kitchen concept might be your recipe for success. In the dynamic food franchise landscape of India, cloud kitchens, also known as virtual or ghost kitchens, have emerged as a game-changer. The beauty of a cloud kitchen is in its simplicity and cost-efficiency. With minimal overhead costs and the flexibility to operate without needing a physical dining space, this innovative model significantly lowers the investment barrier. The Rolling Plate, a pioneering name in the food industry, has harnessed the power of cloud kitchens to offer a unique business proposition. As a franchisee with The Rolling Plate, you can tap into the growing demand for delicious, convenient, and quality food. From biryanis to burgers, our diverse menu appeals to a broad audience. The support and expertise provided by The Rolling Plate empower you to navigate the virtual kitchen landscape with confidence. If you want to ride the wave of food franchise success with low investment and high-profit potential, consider joining The Rolling Plate's network of cloud kitchen franchisees in India. Your journey to culinary entrepreneurship begins here.

Fast food is a prism for understanding race, shifts in the movement for civil rights, the dissemination of black culture, and racial capitalism—the deep connections between the development of modern capitalism and racist subjugation and oppression—since the 1960s.

Poultry workers are paid very little: in the United States, two cents for every dollar spent on a fast-food chicken goes to workers, and some chicken operators use prison labor, paid twenty-five cents per hour. Think of this as Cheap Work. In the US poultry industry, 86 percent of workers who cut wings are in pain because of the repetitive hacking and twisting on the line. Some employers mock their workers for reporting injury, and the denial of injury claims is common. The result for workers is a 15 percent decline in income for the ten years after injury. While recovering, workers will depend on their families and support networks, a factor outside the circuits of production but central to their continued participation in the workforce. Think of this as Cheap Care. The food produced by this industry ends up keeping bellies full and discontent down through low prices at the checkout and drive-through. That's a strategy of Cheap Food....You can't have low-cost chicken without abundant propane: Cheap Energy. There is some risk in the commercial sale of these processed birds, but through franchising and subsidies, everything from easy financial and physical access to the land on which the soy feed for chickens is grown to small business loans, that risk is mitigated through public expense for private profit. This is one aspect of Cheap Money. Finally, persistent and frequent acts of chauvinism against categories of animal and human life -- such as women, the colonized, the poor, people of color, and immigrants -- have made each of these six cheap things possible. Fixing this ecology in place requires a final element -- the rule of Cheap Lives. Yet at every step of this process, humans resist....

Companies don’t even need to merge in order to pay workers less than they’d have to pay in a truly free labor market. I’d assumed only high-end employees were ever required to sign noncompete contracts—an HBO executive prohibited from going to work at Netflix, a coder at Lyft who can’t take a job coding for Uber. But no: shockingly, noncompetes have come to be used just as much to prevent a $10-an-hour fry cook at Los Pollos Hermanos from quitting to work for $10.75 at Popeyes. Of all American workers making less than $40,000 a year, one in eight are bound by noncompete agreements. As another way to reduce workers’ leverage, three-quarters of fast-food franchise chains have contractually prohibited their restaurant operators from hiring workers away from fellow franchisees.

Think of it like a fast-food franchise, the informant said, like a pizza delivery service. Each heroin cell or franchise has an owner in Xalisco, Nayarit, who supplies the cell with heroin. The owner doesn’t often come to the United States. He communicates only with the cell manager, who lives in Denver and runs the business for him. Beneath the cell manager is a telephone operator, the informant said. The operator stays in an apartment all day and takes calls. The calls come from addicts, ordering their dope. Under the operator are several drivers, paid a weekly wage and given housing and food. Their job is to drive the city with their mouths full of little uninflated balloons of black tar heroin, twenty-five or thirty at a time in one mouth. They look like chipmunks. They have a bottle of water at the ready so if police pull them over, they swig the water and swallow the balloons. The balloons remain intact in the body and are eliminated in the driver’s waste. Apart from the balloons in their mouths, drivers keep another hundred hidden somewhere in the car. The operator’s phone number is circulated among heroin addicts, who call with their orders. The operator’s job, the informant said, is to tell them where to meet the driver: some suburban shopping center parking lot—a McDonald’s, a Wendy’s, a CVS pharmacy. The operators relay the message to the driver, the informant said. The driver swings by the parking lot and the addict pulls out to follow him, usually down side streets. Then the driver stops. The addict jumps into the driver’s car. There, in broken English and broken Spanish, a cross-cultural heroin deal is accomplished, with the driver spitting out the balloons the addict needs and taking his cash. Drivers do this all day, the guy said. Business hours—eight A.M. to eight P.M. usually. A cell of drivers at first can quickly gross five thousand dollars a day; within a year, that cell can be clearing fifteen thousand dollars daily. The system operates on certain principles, the informant said, and the Nayarit traffickers don’t violate them. The cells compete with each other, but competing drivers know each other from back home, so they’re never violent. They never carry guns. They work hard at blending in. They don’t party where they live. They drive sedans that are several years old. None of the workers use the drug. Drivers spend a few months in a city and then the bosses send them home or to a cell in another town. The cells switch cars about as often as they switch drivers. New drivers are coming up all the time, usually farm boys from Xalisco County. The cell owners like young drivers because they’re less likely to steal from them; the more experienced a driver becomes, the more likely he knows how to steal from the boss. The informant assumed there were thousands of these kids back in Nayarit aching to come north and drive some U.S. city with their mouths packed with heroin balloons.

It is nothing new that there is a lot of money to be made in religion. The sixth-century Quraysh knew this as well as any modern televangelist. In the equivalent of a Wall Street bull market, the elite of Mecca ran the city as a kind of oligarchy, with power in the hands of the wealthy few. Access was always mediated, and always for a fee. Selling the special ihram clothing was part of the business of pilgrimage, as was the provision of water and food for the pilgrims, and the sale of fodder for their camels and donkeys and horses. Which clans controlled which franchises was determined by the Quraysh leadership, who essentially parceled out monopolies (Muhammad’s own clan, the Hashims, held the one on providing water, thanks to Abd al-Muttalib’s ownership of the treasured Zamzam well). Every aspect of the pilgrimage had been carefully calculated down to the last gram of silver or gold or its equivalent in trade. Fees for the right to set up a tent, for entry to the Kaaba precinct, for the officials who cast arrows in front of Hubal or cut the throats of sacrificial animals and divided up the meat—all these and more were predetermined, and to the sole profit of the Quraysh. Their business was faith, and their faith was in business.

she could sell in the café provisions she baked in her own time with a shelf life longer than pastries. When she thought of it there had been a rush of certainty she could do it, and a prickling of pride in having conceived a way to make money on her own. It would double at least what she was making now. Without Nicholas it might never had occurred to her. The other day he had stuck a label, which he had found in the junk drawer, on a plastic-wrapped loaf of banana bread. He wrote on the label with a marker, "From the Summer Kitchen Bakery." She had found the gesture adorable at the time and hugged him, but something about it had evidently started percolating in the recesses of her mind, and now she was lapping at the brew like someone tasting it for the first time and wondering how she had never before tasted such ambition. She was thinking of cellophane-packaged chocolate brownies and caramel blondies and orange-and-almond biscotti and pear and oat slices and butter shortbread and Belgian chocolate truffles, marmalades, chutney, relishes, and jellies beautified in jars with black-and-white gingham hats and black-and-white ribbon tied above skirted brims. She could even sell a muesli mix she had developed, full of organic cranberries and nuts and the zest of unwaxed lemons. And she wouldn't change Nicholas's label at all. A child's handwriting impressed that the goods were homemade. She would have his design printed professionally, in black and white, too, old world, like the summer kitchen itself.

He turned off the freeway onto a wide commercial drive of franchised food and failing business. The