Tesla opens a center on Native American land, selling cars straight to consumers
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
The intent of the NM law that prevented Tesla from doing this e.g. in downtown Santa Fe was to prevent manufacturers from undercutting dealers who had done the work of proving a market by opening their own stores in direct competition. There are arguments for and against this, but it's not clearly a completely stupid idea on its face.
But of course, the law wasn't written to deal with a scenario where there's a new(ish) manufacturer that has no dealers anywhere, least of all in NM, and has no plans to ever have dealers. It only sells its cars in company-owned stores, and opening a new store is not undercutting any existing dealers.
Would the legislators who voted for the legislation have understood the difference if the idea had been presented to them back when this was passed? Would they have worded it differently?
No, it’s pretty much a stupid idea on its face. This is one of many thousands of examples of cronyism in the country, but the political justification at least sounds nice (as they tend to do), in this case the sugar takes the form of protecting local businesses.
> and opening a new store is not undercutting any existing dealers
They wouldn’t be undercutting existing Tesla dealers because there aren’t any, but they would be going Mano-a-Mano with dealers selling other cars. There’s not a Tesla market and an automobile market separate from that.
The wording is irrelevant. The law is working as intended, although it can’t account for dealerships outside their jurisdiction (on Tribal land or out of State). It’s just a bad law.
So it remains in the present that it is 1. cronyism, one of many thousands of forms of it in the country 2. stupid on its face and 3. basically indefensible, but people who have buy-in can be persuaded that it is very defensible.
I have no knowledge about any of this whatsoever, but would venture to guess that in states where this kind of thing happens, licensing to become a distributor may be very difficult. For example, the total number of licenses may be constrained.
“Notify us when you want stock, and we will instantly order, receive and deliver your product to your warehouse. Flat rate charge no matter how large the order.”
However, consumption based taxes (direct or indirect) also disproportionately proscribe lower income people from engaging in such activities. Tax a carton of cigarettes? Worthless if I can just hit the Rez or hop to another town that doesn’t tax. Screwed if you don’t have that kind of mobility. There’s a disturbingly classist nature to them, which gets all the more concerning when it involves fundamental rights - if only the rich can afford to own a gun, get an abortion, speak freely, for example.
Additionally, vice taxes at some high point are effectively prohibition. Make alcohol too expensive (directly/indirectly) and bootlegging becomes more popular, with its attendant health risks, crime, etc. Make cocaine too expensive and meth gets more popular. Sell untaxed cigarettes and witness how laws are only enforced with an implicit threat of violence that may become explicit (ask Eric Garner).
Tough job, controlling societies.
But like many things that are opined on on HN, it's a little more complex than what you wrote, in that they were also trying to prevent tied houses (1) and vertical integration wherein brewers would basically tie into every local bar, creating a local monopoly.
Washington State got rid of the common three tier (2) system in 2012, and it seems to have lead to higher prices. (3)
The options we have for alcoholic consumption might not exist without these sort of regulations.
To be clear I'm not an expert on liquor laws and their economic impacts, but my point is that it seems like there is a complex interplay wherein regulation, enforcement, and power relationships between companies can affect availability and pricing in complex and sometimes counterintuitive ways.
And that's not even getting into smaller regulatory policies that I don't know enough about to even throw out an opinion on. Unlike food, alcohol distributors aren't isn't pay for play slotting fees for shelf placement, and many states require distributors to post and hold prices for 30 days, for example.
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-tier_system_(alcohol_dis... 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tied_house 3 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4608622/
What is stopping Tesla from structuring a corp owned dealership in NM? I know there are lots of "dealerships" that exist only on paper with no lot or cars that exclusively sell OEM parts online.
Why is Tesla going so far out of their way to avoid state laws here?
Undoubtedly being protected from competitors is good for someone, but it is rarely the consumer that benefits. Its hard to see how car dealers could be the exception.
Thing was that by allowing dealers to open the business first, manufacturers could entirely offload that risk of opening a location that wasn't profitable, and watch the orders from the dealers. Anywhere that sold well, just open up your own store and undercut the dealer until he goes out of business and then return prices to what the dealer was originally selling for.
Putting in laws was meant to put a stop to that practice. Like I said, it's just something I vaguely recall reading on the internet so take it for what it's worth.
But I wouldn't bet on it, since Amazon already has all the people capable of doing anything in their pockets anyways.
Was there any legitimate basis for this fear though? Was this a tactic that was ever provably executed by a manufacturer? Or was it just a made-up scenario by dealerships to push these laws that massively benefit them?
Amazon of course denies that it does this, but the anecdata seems irrefutable to me.
They could easily undercut the dealers and drive them out of business. The law was designed to protect the dealers from the manufacturers.
We are seeing it more and more now in many markets and niches as manufactures are cutting out dealers that built the markets and selling 'direct to consumer'. The difference is that most manufacturers saw what happened to the car companies and are trying to carefully avoid having the same thing happen to them.
“Oh don’t open a Chevy dealership, in 6 months they’ll come in and undercut you”. And then there it is. Either you don’t open a dealership (fine) or the manufacturer builds a reputation for not undercutting dealers (also fine).
IMO the law was protecting special interests from the start. This is an example of poorly regulating capitalism.
Then again, Apple dicks its partners over and hasn't suffered much.
There are Apple stores but they don't really compete with the big box stores that sell Apple products. Though I would be interested in seeing data on where most Apple products are purchased from.
If so, I guess I'll have to eat my words, but it just really sounds like a hypothetical scenario the dealerships would have cooked up to try and push these laws that massively benefit them.
High voltage parts are a little different, but I expect that even that will change as demand grows and training becomes more readily available. Right now there are some real safety concerns there.
It kept more profits in the states with dealerships versus car manufacturers.
Let's say non-manufacturer revenue over a car's TCO is X. The largest portion of X will be spent on non-local goods and local labor regardless of who takes the profit, which has to be low enough to prevent stronger 3rd party service. It isn't like all cars would be shipped back to the factory for service.
But did it ever actually happen before those laws were put into place? Or was it simply the justification of the richest man in town creating a monopoly for himself?
It's almost like the interests of the market lead it to self-regulate or something...
Proving that there was a market for cars? If so that seems unlikely that you'd need to prove that there's a market for them in NM. So perhaps the dealers proved the market for specific types of cars, like Fords and GMs. In that case, they never did that for Tesla, so it's not a fair law. In any case, this belongs in a contract, not the legal code.
A law to protect a useless middleman? Seems completely stupid to me.
To come in and undercut dealers is much less risky! the manufacturer would be effectively be avoiding the risk (proving the market) and stealing the reward.
I have zero idea of whether or not it's good to regulate against that type of thing, but there's logic there.
In the case of the law, it seems ridiculous that there's no room to say "well clearly this is an exception that doesn't violate the reason the law exists" - is this a matter of dealers pushing to uphold the law because they don't want competition?
It wasn't a stupid idea to provide some protection to dealerships from the manufacturers they represent, but it is stupid to use it to block manufacturers that have no dealers.
In general though, I’m always elated to see sovereignty of native nations.
Think what they're really protecting here is that dealerships must house, maintain, and purchase a lot of very expensive merchandise (vehicles) and if a more "official" distribution channel popped up in town, that'd hose dealerships that have invested a lot in a particular brand(s).
But usually it's very hard to change them, and so they pile up as so much Legacy Code.
Often waiting for a clever law enforcement officer or lawyer to use them to their advantage.
My question: Why autos, but not other consumer goods? Should I be restricted from buying an iPhone from an Apple store, rather than Greg’s Phone Emporium?
Now days other laws pretty much make this a non-issue although you could argue that the repair/service process for Tesla's is exactly what these laws were intended to prevent; who would want to own a Tesla dealership if you can't get the parts to fix your customers's cars? e.g. Your son's basketball coach is going to keep calling until you get his car fixed.
In your example, you would be restricted to buying from Greg's Phone Emporium because Greg is thought to care more about repairing your phone than Apple.
Edit: The biggest issue with the current dealership system is that it, of course, just evolved into rent seeking and over-complicated purchase process. The auto companies have systems to make sure dealers sell cars no matter what and the dealerships have ways of extracting extra profit from their customers.
Local people close down their local businesses all the time, though. In fact, the manufacturer, because of vertical integration, is more likely to make profit than independent dealer, and so less likely to close down.
Just like foreign countries levying fines on "evil foreign tech companies", it was an older attempt at rent seeking from the "foreign" faraway auto manufacturers.
the guy who owns the local car dealership runs the town. he's got money unlike anybody else in town does. some towns have rich farmers, or rich people who've made their money elsewhere, but unlike them the guy who owns the car dealership knows that his revenue stream depends on maintaining a good relationship with the town, and so he spends money like nobody else does. every local event, sports team, church function, whatever, it's always sponsored by at least one car dealership. and every congressperson who represents one of those districts knows that they really don't want to get on the wrong side of the car dealers.
Apple only dreams of having as much distributed local political power as the car dealers do.
When car companies got their start, it was difficult to scale what we know dealerships do today: advertising, service, sales, inventory management, order management. It was cheaper for ford to use a dealer and have them worry about these things, than to perform their own local market analysis for things like advertising and operate their own dealership.
Eventually, dealerships saw that the writing was on the wall, and that one day these auto manufacturers would become large enough to operate their own dealerships themselves. They ended up lobbying for a law that made direct car sales illegal, and won, codifying their industry into law.
Given how bad Apple are about third-party repairs, yes. This law should extend to anything that's complex enough that it can only be repaired by a specialist.
Maybe they hire some tribe members for jobs, but I would bet only for the untrained jobs. Possibly they'd benefit some from selling/leasing the land and other set up fees, but even that they might pull the usual corporate "tax break" scheme.
Besides, it's entirely possible the way the state fixes this "loophole" puts them in a worse position than currently. The history of renegotiating often doesn't end well for the Natives.
For Tesla at least, taxes are not so much an issue as the regulatory regime prohibiting them from operating outside of reservation altogether. They are happy to pay higher tax, if the alternative is inability to sell cars at all.
But, in general, even if the tax rates on tribal lands are lower than on regular state lands, the tribes still benefit, because it is them who collect the tax, rather than the State. Many polities would rather have a smaller bite of a cake rather than no cake at all. Look at Ireland, for example, which is greatly benefiting exactly from being a EU tax haven: sure, it collects less from Google or Apple than, say, France or Italy would, but they still benefit from their low tax policy.
> and the infrastructure built is unlikely to be useful after the business is gone
If you read the casino, you’ll find that Tesla is actually renovating and using a former casino facility.
> Besides, it's entirely possible the way the state fixes this "loophole" puts them in a worse position than currently. The history of renegotiating often doesn't end well for the Natives.
Yeah, that’s sadly correct: the governments tend to screw small people over when it sees its power and revenues diminished.
Other than that, tax havens have more independence than reservations do. They have theoretical sovereignty, but the federal government largely controls things like police and education. Like when one tried to legalize recreational marijuana the feds immediately threatened a raid.
A group of people are walking down the street when one person among the group points out a 20-dollar bill on the sidewalk. The armchair economist in the group says, "There is no 20-dollar bill here, because if there were, someone would have picked it up by now." Everyone in group defers to their friend's brilliant insight and keeps walking.
No, what they've done with casinos is leverage demand plus state prohibition to eatablish heavily regulated, heavily taxed, licensed local monopolies, that extract monopoly rents from consumers, and from which the native governments likewise extract monopoly rents (leaving sufficient remainder for the operators to be happy with the deal.)
Casinos are pretty much the opposite of the proposed “win the race to the regulatory and revenue extraction minimum” game suggested for the “free trade zones”.
What's the opportunity there? The opportunity to attract economic activity without capturing revenue from it, while incurring all the environmental costs?
Seems to be an anti-opportunity.
I.e. plenty of opportunity for the locals.
This is an ingenious solution to bypass a stupid law. The car dealers in NM who want to keep Tesla out can pound sand.
I hope that Tesla (and other auto manufacturers) can go one step further and provide lasting, meaningful employment and other opportunities to local residents in the reservations. Casinos often fail or extract exploitative concessions and demands on local tribes.
As of Oct 2018.
>Where Tesla is banned
>Here are those states: Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas.
>Then there are nine states that limit the number of dealerships Tesla can open: Colorado (limit: one), North Carolina (one), Virginia (two), Georgia (five), Maryland (four), New Jersey (four), New York (five), Ohio (three), Pennsylvania (five).
The other problem is how the tribe implemented its TERO (Tribal Employment Rights Ordinance or Office) rules. They can often be particularly odious to business ventures on the reservation.
As to adding land, its complicated https://www.bia.gov/bia/ots https://www.fns.usda.gov/fdpir/distinction-between-reservati...
No. Just as US states can't (tribal “sovereignty” is even farther from that of independent states than that of US states is.)
> Buy land, turn into embassy
Even for entities that can create embassies, that's not how they are created. You can't just acquire fee simple title and then at-will promote it to embassy status.
For Tesla to kill third-party dealers, they'd have to do everything third-party dealers do, and then they'd be indistinguishable from third-party dealers.
It's fashionable to think Tesla has the Better Way and that auto dealers are universally bad, but consumers largely don't agree.
1. When I've a Tesla problem, they simply don't respond. They don't answer emails. They don't answer the phone. They don't return calls. It's literally impossible to remedy a problem. It took 6 months of unbelievable frustration to resolve an obviously incorrect lease issue ("You owe X.", "No, I already paid. Here are the receipts."). This same issue with a BMW, Porsche, or Lexus is resolved in 2 minutes in a normal model.
2. The franchise model - at a maco level - keeps more money locally. I like money staying local, seeing kids sports teams sponsored by Bob's Ford, and generally support anything that promotes a broader distribution of wealth. The extraction of wealth out of a community and simply concentrated up to the already mega-wealthy disturbing. This is Standard Oil putting local gas stations out of business by price dumping, only to later swoop in unchallenged.
In theory that sponsorship money could stay local, if the people who saved money by buying cars direct from Ford gave it personally to the local sports teams instead of giving it to Bob first.
tesla's advertising campaign is unlikely to sponsor a local sports team, because the scale is too small and there's too many local sports teams for a corporate to deal with.
The parents themselves will not see value in doing a local sports team sponsorship - they might donate just to keep it alive, but if that was possible, the sports team would not have needed sponsorship in the first place!
Under no scenario would the parents who saved some money from buying a car would give that savings to the local sports team the same way a sponsor would.
If Ford sells cars for $5k, and Bob's Ford sells cars for $6k, then when you buy a car from Bob, he has $1k left over. That's $1k of money that "stays local".
Alternatively, if you buy it from Ford for $5k, you have $1k left over. That's $1k of money that "stays local".
What's the difference? Why would you rather fund Bob than keep the extra yourself?
There wouldn't need to be laws restricting Tesla from selling direct to consumer if that was the case.
Let the consumer decide what they want.
That's just not true. Consumers wouldn't have a choice if an automaker was allowed to make their new vehicles only available from a direct showroom.
And currently car companies compete with each other. If one saw third party showrooms as something the consumer wants, then they would continue doing it to compete.
Do you think manufacturers of products should be forced to sell items to any business?
The competition that matters is against other automakers.
Where car dealerships are passed down from father to son, for generations, and is locally one of the most powerful organizations, to the point that competition is outright prohibited, it's not a free market, which is one of the cornerstones of capitalism.
I don't have a choice when it comes to buying a tesla - am I losing out as a consumer?
What do third-party dealers do that Tesla does not?
I hazard a guess that Tesla's are sold on the East and West coast.
Of the 10 states with outright bans on manufacturer sales, all but Texas and West Virginia have tribal lands that theoretically could be used as a helpful loophole to this protectionism. Maybe not always Tesla’s the first choice of location, but a 50 mi drive beats a 300 mile drive, and sufficient to break the teeth of these laws.
Please dont be dismissive of “flyover states.” The lack of dealerships and service centers certainly impairs the sales process, and then California’s extremely generous (and unnecessary?) EV incentive gives many people from other states an incentive jump through some hoops and papering to purchase and title their vehicle there.
Especially since the Wright brothers are from a flyover state. No one would be "flying over" without them.
I think there are multiple reservations in San Diego County. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pala_Indian_Reservation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rincon_Band_of_Luise%C3%B1o_In...
There are also reservations in Riverside Country - isn't that close to LA? e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agua_Caliente_Band_of_Cahuilla...
It is time to end these laws that stop competition. Let America innovate with better business models. The only losers are current car dealership owners that refuse to adapt.
This isn't a good thing.
And yes this just shows those services are valuable, and likely at reduced costs as well.
When my temperature sensor stopped working I had to drive it down for them to fix it. They gave me a loaner too, some early 2000s Honda CRV.
But just to be clear my comment was more so directed at the general services aspect. Don’t count my single experience to be a good data point. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Transit_Connect#Tariff_ci...
The next-generation Transit Connect, due for the 2022 model year, will be fully assembled for North America in Mexico at Hermosillo Stamping and Assembly. Like all future Ford products built in Mexico, it will comply with the 75% US/Canada/Mexico content rule of the new USMCA trade deal set to take effect in 2020.
And more generally speaking, having much smaller states where you could drive 10mn to the state next door to do things your own is too dumb or too corrupt to let happen is a fantastic idea.
Competition FTW !
The laws preventing manufacturers from going straight to consumer are there because of lobbying, there is no indication most states would desire killing one bird much less two.
Dealerships are places where one has some of the worst experiences.
That's the point... the tribes have the right to decide what happens on their land. It's like calling "free speech" a loophole when someone notices the first amendement.
I don't believe that this should apply to Tesla, because they do not use dealers anywhere.
I think that Tesla should be allowed to open a store wherever they want (subject to other rules & regulations), since they have never used dealers.
Then again, way back when, dealers may have been the weaker party in contract negotiations, so the law was intended to protect them. That almost certainly isn't the case today, though, given the proliferation and (local) political power car dealerships tend to have.
It doesn't seem right to force an inefficient, outdated situation to continue to exist purely because it benefits a group that would otherwise be outcompeted.
Not everyone in the tribe would be supportive, i.e. it would be a political risk. You would probably generate some tax revenue, but especially in the early days (in Oregon), it wasn't clear how much you'd make, whether banks would support you, whether the DEA would get angry about "interstate" commerce, regardless of their actual jurisdiction etc.
So their answer was, at the time no, you cannot grow weed commercially even though there wasn't really anything stopping them at that point. However they, and many other tribes, operate casinos(against the law in their state) and sell fireworks, potentially against state law or city ordinance; the latter because the ATF doesn't care, and the former because it represents over 80% of the tax revenue of the tribe and there is a history already built there between regulators and the tribe.
No. While they have their own laws subject to US federal law, that law has limited authority over non-Indians, especially on non-Indian owned property, on Indian reservations.
The reservations answer to the Feds and have compacts with the states. Tribal sovereignty is complicated.
Yes, but not in the sense that the US is sovereign. Or even the sense that US States are sovereign. “Sovereign” in US domestic law means a lot of different things, and tribal governments are pretty much the least sovereign of all the US’s sovereginties.
As for the eligibility guidelines, see CA's guidelines: https://cleanvehiclerebate.org/eng/eligibility-guidelines
Citation? Are you also claiming that if i live in NM but buy my Tesla from CA, there's also no state EV incentive?
See, for example, from CA's EV incentives page: https://cleanvehiclerebate.org/eng/requirements/919, or the more readable version: https://cleanvehiclerebate.org/eng/eligibility-guidelines
I can buy my car from a foreign person and still receive incentives because I live in a state that offers them? This has little to do with selling cars on tribal lands if so.
Tribal land is not state land, so sales by tribal dealerships do not qualify for state incentives. This is decades-old established law across the U.S.
This is just another example of Musk thinking he's found a clever loophole without realizing why nobody else was doing it in the first place (hint: because it doesn't work, and Tesla would have learned this spending less than an hour consulting with someone who handles tribal law).
They all have their own separate case law, legal structure, processes.
There is no chronicling or comparison of any of this.
Current Indigenous people recognition suffers from overinclusivity, grouping many distinct cultures as one - which has been necessary for representation but is counterproductive in many ways. (For example, do all headdress wearing tribes care about who wears a headdress, how do you know one didnt create a licensing system specifically sanctioning random people wearing it for whatever reason, if they did sanction it are they the proper authority to sanction it, should a century long squabble between two tribes over this issue matter to us? These are the kind of nuanced questions that aren’t being asked)
The infrastructure is very low in practically all.
It doesn't have to be.
Each one has to be approached distinctively.
There is much that has never been challenged.
There is no specific reason. Although there is a shared general distrust of those who look like the people in the majority.
There are approximately 326 Indian land areas in the U.S. administered as federal Indian reservations [0]
https://biamaps.doi.gov/indianlands/
https://www.bia.gov/sites/bia.gov/files/assets/public/webtea...
There are more tribes still seeking this
I will say as a consumer, I dislike the typical car dealership user experience. Lots of back-and-forth games on pricing, getting upsold on random add-ons or financial products, having to wait around a lot while your rep checks in the back about yet more paperwork, etc. Maybe some people feel this bazaar-like experience helps them nab a good deal, but I doubt I'd be worse off paying a standard price set by the manufacturer, delivered to me by a store that's not trying to squeeze out their own margin through those add-ons.
While this sounds good in theory, what's to prevent the manufacturer from doing the same ? If you look at Google Fi, it probably wanted to be different from the usual carriers, but in reality they are not that much different and worse in many ways. They peddle the same overpriced phones/payment plans and try to keep you on the network, blurring the line between device cost and plan cost. They also distinguish between regular data and hotspot data. If you go back to AOSP in Nexus days, AOSP didn't have any distinction between the two.
Ultimate success remains to be seen but their direct sales method has done surprisingly well and Tesla centers don’t have the reputation typical of car dealerships yet.
> Tesla opens a showroom on Native American land in New Mexico, getting around the state's ban on automakers selling vehicles straight to consumers
Was too long, but could I suggest somehow including the link between 'on Native American land' and 'selling directly'? Perhaps it's clear for those in the US, but my reading was more like the act of building on NA land was illegal, and the direct selling was an unrelated detail.
Something about avoiding monopolies?
Not a great reason …
From a consumer perspective it reduces welfare (like most worker protections do), but similar to real estate agents, car dealerships are very active in lobbying local governments (in part b/c the amount of jobs they 'create').
Wouldn't direct sales locations/showrooms operated by the manufacturers still need to hire salespeople, as well as automotive technicians to do the maintenance?
It seems that the jobs wouldn't necessarily be affected, the owners of the dealerships are the ones who would lose out on revenue.
The bigger problem is that taxes are so low, and that manual labor jobs (which the rich outsourced to other countries), just don’t exist at scale anymore.
The best solution is probably something like taxing productivity gains and then bending the benefit curve towards the workers who have received none of the gains by, eg, paying for their kids health and educational expenses, letting them have free training, giving them stipends to travel, etc.
The biggest problem has been that all the productivity gains have gone to the 1% essentially.
Going back to the other commenters note on wishful thinking: your situation requires a major refactoring of American politics and governance.
'Subsidizing' car dealerships at it's worse makes cars slightly more expensive, which is probably a societal good (yes even electric cars).
For the majority of humans, this is not the view.
In the eyes of the humans of the world, would they want a car that is 100x cheaper so that they could afford one?
I’m guessing yes, but it sounds like you are arguing that it is in their best interest to not have that desire play out. This type of paternalism is common, especially for people that like to make decisions for others :)
You don’t think society should do ANYTHING to combat traffic, global warming, vulcanized rubber micro plastics, parking scarcity in cities, auto-related deaths, OR global political instability tied to crude oil trade?
Ok boomer.
It seems like the only person really losing in that scenario would be the dealership owner, which explains why they lobby so heavily to keep those laws in place.
If that was the goal, then the state government should have opened their own dealerships and distributed the profits amongst the state's residents. Or better yet, simply operated the dealership at break even.
I think it’s similar to the law preventing movie studios from opening theaters.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/09/04/dealers-choice...
Its really unlikely that existing brands would be able to change at this point, at least the US brands.
At the very least, I would like the option to buy directly, since I probably don't use the services provided by the dealership anyway.
The "Paramount Decree" is lifted as of Aug 7, 2020 with a 2 year sunset period, so as of Aug 7, 2022, there is no law preventing studios from owning theaters.
MCU, Star Wars, Avatar... get blocked from showing them as a cinema owner and you can close shop. Especially with how many new films the MCU alone will bring up over the next years.
Probably not anytime soon, since in less than a year, they will be able to own the cinemas.
One day they’ll be an interesting case study in business school.