Real estate Market and Investments in C-stores
C-store real estate in major metro areas isn’t like traditional retail real estate. C-stores are designed to fulfill the immediate needs of consumers in daily situations. Traditional brick-and-mortar stores are not struggling to compete with online shopping alternatives in the last few years. So far, the convenience store industry has been spared the affliction experienced by the sister street-retail formats where online shopping, such as Amazon.com, is taking away a larger share of sales, especially clothing and home electronics. Our salvation is simply because online shopping does not compete with convenience retail which is excellent for us and our portfolio of c-store real estate. For the convenience industry, pretax profits per store have been growing since 2009, and I believe we will continue to do so for the next ten years. I think the most significant contributor in the markets we serve is simply population growth. One of the fundamental economic drivers of demand for real...