Last weekend I had some time to kill while my daughter was at a birthday party, so I took advantage of the party’s location and went to Trader Joe’s. The good news is that I made perfect use of 90 minutes. The bad news is that I violated one out of two cardinal rules of grocery shopping: 

1. Always have a list 
2. Never go hungry 
   

While I did have a general list, I was starving…and boy did it show at the checkout. Do you know how hard it is to spend $200 at Trader Joe’s? My grocery bill at regular ol’ Harris Teeter never hits $200, even when I use Instacart; my small family just doesn't consume all that much. So this was an eye-popper.

Had prices unexpectedly increased at Trader Jo...

I guess it’s been building for a while, but I’m officially on the Formula 1 bandwagon. I’ve never voluntarily watched athletic events, and I've certainly never spent money on one, but here I am trying to figure out how to make a friend with an apartment along the track in Monaco. Yes, I know there are grand prix races in the US, but I’m in it for the champagne and glamour, people.

 I should give due credit to Dream Space graduate Robert who is opening SimRace Orlando. I learned a lot about racing culture and Formula 1 working with him on his Powerhouse Business Plan. So I was thrilled when my favorite podcast, Acquired, released an episode on the history and business of Formula 1.*

Sheila here, saying Χαίρετε! That’s hello in ancient Greek, apparently. If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you know that I love to connect my nerdy interests du jour to retail real estate. Today we’ll visit the 12th century BCE, where the drama would definitely be on Bravo if Andy Cohen had been there. 

Some months back, I wrote about the story of Oedipus, and how (obviously) it’s a cautionary tale about retail real estate. Lucky for you, my off-duty self hasn’t left the ancient world, and I don’t see a departure anytime soon. Firstly because there’s about a thousand years of material, and secondly because it’s basically Game of Thrones on a recognizable map. 

Whil...

This is probably not news to you, but since we send these newsletters every week, I basically move through life asking myself how to make this thing I [saw / heard / experienced] into content that at least mildly connects to retail real estate. When I find something that provides multiple angles, I’m thrilled. So thank you, Disney and Taylor Swift, for making the six-part docuseries The End of An Era about the record-breaking The Eras Tour. Also, thanks to my sister who told me I should watch it and that I’d probably cry. She was right about both. 

To refresh your memory, the tour included 149 shows in 51 cities on 5 continents over the course of 21 months. At each performance, Taylor an...

My favorite part of the Dream Space Accelerator comes at the very end. Without fail, right when we’re finally done with the Powerhouse Business Plan, I get to hear some version of this: 

🤯 I am so grateful that I did this, because there was so much I hadn’t thought about. I had no idea how much I had to consider, and I was sure I’d covered everything before we started.

And then I respond with some version of this:

🎭 How could you have known? Unless you’ve opened a retail business before, you’d have zero reason to know 75% of this stuff. Retail is theater!

And it truly is. What we experience as consumers – picking up a latte, going to a yoga class, ordering a beer – is the sta...

We all know that Ben Franklin was right about death and taxes, but there’s another certainty of life that he left out. If I could Bill and Ted my way back to the 1790’s (no thanks), I think he’d agree that when you want something is rarely when you can have it...if you can have it at all. 

Obviously I’m not talking about anything money can buy, since you can buy anything on the internet and have it within 2-3 business days. But for the big stuff that really matters --  security, health, relationships -- as hard as we will something into existence, we have limited control. 

All we can do is dig deep and have hope and patience. Well, that’s exactly what Cara and Travis Loving did.

 ...

We talked the other week about the critical role that project managers play in the buildout process protecting your budget, timeline, and sanity. You absolutely must have an experienced, professional buildout team if you want any hope of making it through in one piece. But even with the best teams in place, there are a host of unwelcome surprises along the way that can only be solved with history’s oldest salve: money.

Modifying any physical space – turning it from one look and use into another – is not a matter of imagination. It’s a very real process that’s ruled by physics and building code. 

So even in the best cases where the pre-lease construction due diligence has been duly done, te...

If at any point you’ve been in a romantic relationship that lasted, let’s say, a year or more, you are surely familiar with the idea that the head-spinning early days of infatuation don’t last forever. In fact, legit scientific studies have shown that this period of “omg he’s so cuuuute chewing with his mouth open” lasts about six months.

Thanks to very real things like brains and human evolution, none of us can outsmart the chemical reactions that happen inside of us when we’re staring down the promise of new, exciting, this-is-definitely-the-thing-I’ve-been-missing love.

😑 But we all know how this story goes. After that first period of flooding dopamine, the drugs wear off, life beg...