The Best One Yet - 🎁 “Best worst gift ever” — Bruce Springsteen’s $500M song. Toys ‘R’ Us’ mall revolution. Gift Cards’ moment.

Episode Date: December 17, 2021

Snackers, it’s our last pod before we return on Monday, January 3rd (although we whipped up a couple bonus pods for ya over the holidays), so we made this one a TBOY. Bruce Springsteen sold his music collection to Sony for $500M because it’s the Year of the Great Sell-Off. Toys ‘R’ Us opened an amusement park store, because it’s part of the formula for the future of malls. And the gift that won 2021 is… The Gift Card (it’s all about timing).$SONY $TGT $SBUXGot a SnackFact? Tweet it @RobinhoodSnacks @JackKramer @NickOfNewYorkWant a shoutout on the pod? Fill out this form:https://forms.gle/KhUAo31xmkSdeynD9Got a SnackFact for the pod? We got a form for that too:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe64VKtvMNDPGSncHDRF07W34cPMDO3N8Y4DpmNP_kweC58tw/viewformLearn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Actually, it would be great storytelling. We started the pod like, And then I traveled through the seven levels of the candy cane forest past the sea of twirling, swirly, gumdrops. Let's do it. This is Nick. This is Jack. And this is Snacks Daily.

It is Friday. It is the real Friday. It is December 17th. I hate to be a cotton-headed ninniggin, but it's her last pot of the holidays. What is the airing of grievances? Snackers, we're going to rest our vocal cords for two weeks, and we're hoping that you guys get.

get some rest too. We're rooting for you. I'm staying in Vermont for the first half, Florida for the second. I'm going back to Italy to do some skiing because apparently we left something in Italy. Snackers, we're back on Monday, January 3rd with our regular programming. But we have a couple surprises for you between now and that. That's right. Jack and I don't just whip up takeaways. We whipped up two bonus pods for you dropping over the holidays like a supreme sneaker. In the meantime, our final pod before our two-week vacay is the best one yet. It's a TBOI, the best one of the year. Jack, What's our first story? Surprise! Toys R Us is back again.

Doys R Us. It's in the shopping mall and we've got the recipe for the future of the mall. For our second story, Bruce Springsteen sold all his songs to Sony for $500 million. It's the biggest music deal ever because it's the year of the great cash out. For our third and final story, the number one gift of 2021 is the gift card. It's a gift card. It's not just a piece of plastic, though, Snackers. The gift card is a metaphor. You know, in German, Das Gift means the poison. Jack, you know, in Russia, the card gifts you. Honestly, I am so excited about this lineup today.

This is a fantastic pod lineup, Jack. But before we hit that mix, special edition of Horters Almanac, week 91 and three quarters. Yeah, Snackers, Jack and I have been keeping track things that were running out of because of the pandemic. Unfortunately, the 12 days of Christmas, it was already expensive. I mean, I'm looking at this now, Jack, seven swans of swimming. You're going to get that? Costco. But the 12 days of Christmas this year is officially 5.7% pricier than last year. True story.

According to our buddies over at PNC Bank, you can blame inflation, you can blame hoarding, and yeah, you can blame shortages too, all of it. PNC Bank has been keeping track of the 12 days of Christmas index for 38 straight years. Great tradition. Jack, can we talk about the five golden rings? They're getting more expensive. Gold! Silver and gold!

How about the milk from those eight maids and milking? That's getting more expensive. expensive too. Well, it's oat milk now. So, you know, that's like 10 bucks. Jack, can we talk about the 10 lords a leapin? Well, they sold their podcast to Spotify. So it's paywalled now. The price of three French hens. It's up 40% to $255. That's just inflation. Two turtle doves. Up 50% to $450. And a partridge in a pear tree. That last one's going to cost you 228.68. Snackers, add all that up. And the 12 days of Christmas, that's going to cost you $41,206 this year. Whoa.

Sit down, stand up, sit back down again. Keep the change, you filthy animal. That's up too, because home alone on Disney Plus, it's a dollar more expensive than last year. But guess what, Snackers? The guack, it's still extra. Two turtural doves with a side of guac, please. Let's hit our really expensive three stories. You're tuned in the snacks daily.

We spoke to the lawyers and we got to get something illegal out the way. For snacks about the hair ain't food It's air candy They don't reflect the views of the Robberhood family It's all informational just so You know, we're not recommending any securities Nope It's not a research report or investment advice

Not an offer or sale of a security Right Snacks is digestible Business news for you Robahub financial LLC Member Fenra slash SIPC For our first story Toys are us

They're back, they're making a comeback again and it's in a New Jersey mall. Very key reason. Here's the recipe for the modern shopping mall. Okay, first of all, we got to double check the whiteboard on this. Toys R Us back from the dead. Toys R Us declared bankruptcy in 2018. Their last U.S. store hung on until the pandemic when it closed this past January.

But that giraffe just will not die. Like a Lord Voldemort doll, this thing, it isn't dead yet. It's spirit persevered. And now Toys R Us is resurrecting at New Jersey's. American Dream Mega Mall. Now, Jack, this is like their one location in the U.S., right? But it also is like their biggest location ever. Right.

And they're going to open with extended hours for the rest of the year, perfect for last minute procrastinators getting their final gifts. Now, they're back from Bankersie, and you know what? They're not just a toy store anymore. This is more like Duncan's toy chest powered by the Walt Disney Imagineers. It's 20,000 square feet. It's like a McMansion. It's a two-story store.

And sure, you could take the escalator to get down there. or you could take the slide. One second, Jack, I'm checking the map. Maybe I'll meet you at the ice cream shop in the Toys R Us. Snackers based in New Jersey, let us know if the slide has a weight limit. If there's no weight limit, I'll see you next weekend at this Toys R Us. You go in for the life-size elephant toy. You'll walk out with six banana splits.

This is a modern masterpiece of retail as experience. This is merchandise and it is merriment joined into one retail love. But that's not it. The Toys R Us mall's neighbor, like the store next door, it is Nickelodeon Universe. So this isn't a regular shopping mall snackers. On the other side of the Toys R Us is a water park. Nickelodeon Universe, a water park. The American Dream Mall, New Jersey is a kid's fantasy land.

It is. They got two amusement parks, too many golf courses, and, you know, an indoor ski resort. An indoor ski resort. If you've ever gone to a Giants Jets game or like a concert at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, You've seen the construction of this indoor ski resort because it's a hill. There's a skating rink and an underwater world aquarium and a maze of mirrors. If you bring your kids to this mall, get ready because they're going to get lost. This is like Pandora's labyrinth.

You're going to stick a homing device on your four-year-old. That's what you got to do. Now, we should point out, on the financial side, things are a little less fun. This thing's been under construction for 15 years. And it's riddled with the 3Ds. Yeah, delays, defaults, and over $2 billion of debt. But the American Dream Mall is open. And it illustrates some retail creativity.

They're reimagining the shopping mall. And that's why we're talking about it. Jack and I have told you before, retail's not dead. Bad retail's dead. So you've got to make retail an experience. Last month, we covered on this pod that every brand needs one location that feels like amusement park retail. Well, Jack Petco's done it.

Canada Goose has done it. Ferrari's done it. They've Disney-Fied their flagship stores. And now Toys R Us has done it too with the slide and the ice cream. shops and the Duncan's Toy Chest. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over in the mall industry? To nail the mall, you have to nail the anchor. Snackers, the mall apocalypse, it is a story as old as time.

There have been hundreds, thousands of articles written about the demise of the mall. Here's a big reason why. The big anchor tenants of the malls that we grew up going to, they offered really bad retail experiences. It's part of the business model, but, you know, Lord and Taylor, Sears, Century 21, Modell. Sports Authority, none of them survived the e-commerce era and the malls depended on them. Malls became scary ghost towns at one point because the anchor tenants left and then a bunch of other stores left too. But get this, the Wall Street Journal just noticed a 10-year high in shopping mall real

estate leases. There is a mall renaissance a little bit and it's being led by grocery stores as the anchor tenants of America's malls. Grocery stores are the new anchors. Everyone's got to get this week's food. Why not go shopping after for clothes and shoes at the shopping mall? So the American Dream Mall, yeah, it isn't thriving totally yet, but it is buzzing with amusement amusement parks. Kids get to ride the loop-de-loop. Parents cash in on their gift cards in the meantime. So the modern key to a successful mall, it is the right anchor tenant. Maybe the right anchor tenant is an amusement park retail situation, or maybe it's a grocery store, or maybe you have both in your mall. Either way, the number one recipe, just don't make the anchor a department store.

For our second story, Jack, I'm sorry I've ruined your life and crammed 11 cookies into the VCR. And then I crossed the Lincoln Tunnel. The second story stackers, well played, by the way. Bruce Springsteen, he doesn't own his music anymore. He just sold it for half a billion dollars. Because it's a great year to sell. In fact, it's the year of the great selloff. Yeah, across everything.

So, first of all, Snackers, this is crazy. Bruce, his music, it's already made him rich. Born in the USA, sold 15 million copies. Yeah, one to Jack's dad, one to my dad. The river went platinum five times selling five million copies. But Jack, what could make Bruce Springsteen even richer? Well, people are still listening to his music so he could make tons and tons of money licensing his music to the tech platforms. Licensing Snackers music streaming, that would be licensing Bruce Springsteen's music. When you tag a Bruce song on your Instagram story, that's licensing. Bruce gets paid.

Okay, Peloton instructor legend Cody Rigsby could use Dancing in the Dark to do an entire Peloton ride and they would have to pay Bruce Springsteen. Because he owns his master's. All the ways to monetize music in the modern digital economy, it's through licensing. But for Bruce, instead of slowly collecting license royalty payments every year, year after year, a little bit every year, Bruce wants to get paid a huge amount of money right now and just forget about it. Bruce wants more glory days, less Thunder Road.

So Bruce is getting $500 million from Japan's Sony music. Yeah, so Sony, publicly traded Sony, gets to be the boss on all of Bruce's future royalties of Bruce's music forever. That's the deal that happened yesterday. And this sets a record high price for one single musician's collection of music, breaking Bob Dylan's $300 million that happened earlier this year. Actually, Snackers, Jack and I jumped in Snacks style. there are a lot of artists who specifically in this year, their jams were sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. David Bowie, Stevie Nicks, Neil Young, their collections were all sold this year. All the sounds of angels. But wait, there's even more and more because it's not just musicians who've been selling their most prized assets in 2021.

CEOs, authors, and producers are all cashing out this year too. This is what Jack and I find fascinating about this is more than music. According to the Wall Street Journal, more CEOs have sold more. more stock of their companies than ever before in history. 82 corporate executives this year sold over $100 million of stock that they own in the company they work for, which is nearly three times more than in 2019. Jack, I'm looking at our list here. Elon sold over $10 billion with a B of Tesla stock and Microsoft CEO sold over half of

his Microsoft stock. AMC's CEO, the Silverback ape himself, Adam Aeron. He has sold 90% of the stock he owns an A&A. AFC, probably like shocked the stock price is so hot. Raul Dahl's estate for like the classic books of our childhood. They sold the rights to all his books over to Netflix. MGM is selling the rights to James Bond to Amazon. And after a 15% rise in the U.S. median home price,

2021 is the highest year of real estate sales in 15 years. Everybody is selling. We're talking music, stock, movies, books, houses, you name it. It's being sold at huge valuation. 2021 has been the year of the cash out. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for all our buddies who are selling for hundreds of millions of dollars right now? Why was 2021 the year of the great cash out? Because of prices and taxes.

Exactly. Asset prices, they are so dang high. And tax rates will probably go up in the new year, not down. Next year, who knows what's going to happen. You got the midterm elections, the Omocron variant, and tensions with China and Russia. But the buildback better bill, that's seen. more likely than not, which would mean higher taxes on the wealth. So you got stock prices hitting record highs in 2020 and then even higher highs in 2021. Same thing with homes, music, movies, and everything.

So all those sales like Bruce's we just talked about, they show a desire to cash out now while the market is high and the taxes are low. That's why we have the year of the great cash out. For our third and final story of the year, the top holiday gift of 2021, one is the gift card. It's the gift card. The gift card. But Snackers, we're also giving you two bonus pots. So that was, that's true.

That's the last regular story. We talk about gift cards here. You give someone cash without the shame of like gifting someone cash. Oh, man. You open up the gift card. You know the feeling. How much is it? And if they forgot to write how much it is, you have to awkwardly ask the person who gave

it to you. Like how much, how much is this worth? And then they're like, it's only $25. And you're like, uh. Yeah. Traditionally, you get a three inch by three inch piece of plastic with your name scribbled on it. You're not getting a great feeling. You take off those little adhesive gummies and you see if the price is back there.

Do you recycle those? Well, Snackers, the gift card, it's less of a gift. It's more like a transaction. You're embarrassed to give it, so you stick it in a really tiny envelope. Yeah, Mom got you a PlayStation. Co-worker Carl with all the hair gel gets you a $25 card to Barnes & Noble. Get this. Yes.

The gift card is the biggest holiday gift of the year. It is. It's having its Addison Ray moment. And no, Carl, I can't even buy a full book with $25 bucks at Barnes & Noble. You can get an 18-month calendar. But Snackers, according to Square, the payment processor, they just released some data. Physical gift card sales are up 43% this year from last year to a record high. The reason's pretty clear.

Shortages, the supply chain, pandemic retail. You're not shopping around in store, so you just get someone a card and let them pick it out later. Yeah, Snackers, unlike any other year, you can't get that physical thing. So you're going to give the gift of any. You're Bill DeBarre, it's stuck on a cargo ship for nine days off the port of L.A. Your baby Yoda doll, it's backed up to China. People aren't happy. You can't get the actual gifted target. So your significant other is cool giving you a gift card so you can get it when it's in stock.

And here's what Jack and I find fascinating about the gift card industry. Retailers, they love the gift card mojo. Salespeople definitely get bonuses when they sell gift cards. Because Snackers, retail stores, they are double dipping when you get a gift card. 17% of gift card recipients end up spending more than the gift cards. Yeah, because when you walk into Target, that $50 gift card, it ends up going toward that $80 thing that you actually want. And 20% of gift cards never get used.

You forgot you had them and ended up in your dongle drawer. And Target, Jack, Target still gets the book the revenues for free. It's like a gym membership that never gets used. It's free money for the company. So Jack and I jumped and snacks out. The gift card industry, it's searching right now, but gift cards, are pretty unchanged in 30 years. According to the Smithsonian Magazine,

Legit, Neiman Marcus invented the gift card in 1994, but Blockbuster was the first to really market the gift card. Yes, yeah, I can picture these right now, Jack. You know what, you remember them? It's got the blue ticket thing. Yeah, apparently the chain of Blockbuster was so focused on the gift card that they displayed it in stores,

they didn't focus on the streaming so much. And then in 2001, Starbucks pioneered the first ever refillable gift card. So this was the first refillable gift card. So this was the first refillable gift card you could use more than once. But like the coffee, it's not free refills. You've got to pay to refill that. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over in the gift card industry?

Success? It can come down to timing. Yeah, snackers, spam, like the processed meat product in a can. It's been around for 90 years, but it just had its best year ever. Spam. Spam! There's nothing different about the spam product. It just caught this comfort food trend the pandemic created.

Jack, how about Crocs? Crocs shoe sales? They stagnated for years, but Crocs just had its best year ever. The stock has doubled in 2021. Nothing changed about the product. Crocs just caught a comfort first fashion trip. So Snacker, so many variables go into a successful product sudden growth. What's the product market fit? What's the design? What's the pricing? What's the competition look like? How's the founding team doing? But Jack and I think the one factor you have least control of may actually have the biggest impact.

And that is time. Like the gift card this year, success can come down to timing. Jack, can you whip up the takeaways with extra maple syrup for us over there? Toys R Us is living the American dream at the Mega Mall in New Jersey. Snackers, for a mall to survive, it has to nail the anchor tenant. The great cash out of 2021. We're talking homes, stocks, music, and movies. Because prices are high and taxes, they aren't.

For our third and final story, the gift card. It's the gift of 2021. Success, it can just come down. down to timing. Now, time for our snack fact of the day. This one sent in by Kyle McDougal over in lovely Los Angeles. Snackers, if you find yourself under the mistletoe this holiday season, there's something you should know. Yeah, it's not just a plant leaf that mistletoe. The word mistletoe is actually derived from an obsolete German word that means filth or dung. Yeah. So the original name of mistletoe, the leaf that you may kiss under is technically dung twig. You're kissing under dung twig.

Yeah, we'll just leave it at that. Snackers, you look fantastic today. Jack, T-Boy Pod, by the way, I did not get you the gift card. $30 at Applebee's not happened. I can't believe I took you to Applebee's that one time. You visited my hometown in college. I can't believe. That was embarrassing.

I am on the search, though, for a slam and salmon flannel if anyone has seen one. Because this, I know where I'm going to send that slam and salmon flannel. Somebody call slam and Sam. And as Podfather, I should pursue one for the pod sons. Snackers, I can't wait for you to have these two bonus pods who drop in before the new year. We'd love doing this. this with you every day. And before we go, congrats to Snacker Nate Guera, who just won the annual Houston Christmas-like competition down in Texas. I'll tell you, did you see Trevin and Tom Taria?

I wish. They won the fifth annual ugly sweater party down in Louisiana. And Jack, Dolly Wang, she's becoming a yoga teacher over in Shanghai. Get this, three best friends, Gabby, Josephine, and Kelsey, they all got sweet new jobs in San Francisco. And Danny and Emily, they just got engaged over in Cambridge, send us the ring picks. Congratulations to Derek and Sarah Kubichek, who are now parents of Emery up in Minnesota. And Jenny Wang, congrats in graduating down at Georgia Tech. Congratulations to Carlos for graduating from FSU.

And Veronica Montavo, graduating the Fashion Institute of Technology over in New York City. Happy birthday to Donnie Malpass in Charlotte, North Carolina. And Elliot Ledley, over in New York. Happy 23rd to Masamba in Manchester, England. And Suzanne Wright down in Phoenix. Happy birthday to triathlete Jill Corrigan in Verona, New Jersey. And Sophia Aguirre, Corquera, down in Mexico. And Yorah Kiari in Oakland, California.

And Kellogg MBA, Ramon Torres, happy birthday in Chicago. Happy 25th to Nick B in Chicago. To win logistics. And anyone else celebrating something today, make it a T-Bull. Celebrate the holiday wins. This is Jack. I own stock of Amazon and Netflix, and we both own stock of Block. Robin Hood Snacks, newsletters, and podcasts reflect the opinions of only the authors who are

associated persons of Robin Hood Financial LLC and do not reflect the views of Robin Hood Markets Inc. or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates. They are meant for informational purposes only and are not a recommendation to buy or sell any security, cryptocurrency, or investment strategy in any account. This is not an offer or sale of a security, not a research report, and is not intended to serve as the basis for any investment decision. Any third-party information provided therein does not reflect the views of Robin Hood Markets Inc, Robintoe Financial LLC or any of their subsidiaries or affiliates. All investments involve risk, including loss of principal and past performance, does not guarantee future results. Robin Hood Financial LLC,

member FINRA, SIPC. Where are you going to get that? Costco.