The Best One Yet - 🧀 “No cheese, or yes please?” — Applebee’s perfect Drive-Thru. Match’s single parents app. UFC’s fighter pay.

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

Applebee’s is going from Olive Garden to McDonald’s — it just perfected the Drive-Thru. Match just whipped up its first dating app that’s based on calendars… and it’s for single parents. And Endeavor’s earnings reveal that the Ultimate Fighting Championship may depend on Conor’s muscle a bit too much.$DIN $EDR $MTCHGot 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/viewformID: 2090357Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is Nick. This is Jack. And this is Snacks Daily. It is Tuesday. Tea Boy Tuesday, March 22nd. Brackets are busted. They're broken. Sweet 16 of major mistakes.

Wisconsin, step up to the scale. Step off the scale, Wisconsin. Wisconsin pulled up Peloton. Actually, we pulled up Peloton. Today's pod, though, it's the best one, yeah. It's a TBLI. Jack, what do we got for our first story? Match Group's newest dating app has a built-in scheduler.

Because single parents are busy. Our second story is about Applebee's, where I took Nick freshman year. place. We got some potato skins. It was an interesting choice. You go to Applebee's, you sit for two hours, you get three rounds of margaritas, and he split a couple fried steaks. But Applebee's just perfected the drive-thru. The drive-thru and Applebee's. Our third and final story, we just got the UFC's earnings report. Yeah, the ultimate fighting championships, greatest threat is actually their greatest fighter. Snackers, before we hit that mix. A wonderful mix of stories, Jack. Spring break. However, we have a fall update. We do. A fall semester update, because there's a new class,

Honestly, we should all just get on the wait list for T Swift. T Swift, not a class about the Swift Financial Network. Right, good point, Jack. This is a class about the T Swift Financial Network. Taylor Swift, NYU has a new course completely dedicated to Taylor Swift. It's basically T Swift 101. We're talking two and a half hour long classes. Like, you get two credits for this thing.

If you're majoring in music, then T. Swift is your bar. Jack, she is that. the Odysseus of audio. Have you scoped the syllabus, my friend? Have you not checked out this syllabus? The teacher's like, just check the syllabus, people. You know all too well that I've checked the material in this class next. Oh, I know you have, Jack. Like, what's the impact of streaming on concert ticket pricing? How did Kanye interrupting her Grammy award speech affect her earnings? Honestly, does Jake Jelinehall still have her scarf? If she wears high heels and I wear sneakers, then is she cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers? That's literally classes one.

one through four snackers. You know, take this class through Acapilla, this class. The final project is a 1989 word term paper, by the way. But honestly, it's full of blank space. Don't worry if you don't get an ad. Yeah, just shake it off. Now look what you made me do. If you slack off, yeah, you get a bad grade.

Welcome to New York. Let's exile our three stories. You're tuned in the snacks daily. We spoke to the lawyers. The snacks about the hair ain't food. It's ear 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.

Rob of her financial, LLC, member Fenra slash SIPC. For our first story, Match, launched its newest dating app. It's called Stir and it's for single parents. Now your buddy, Timmy. Yeah, we noticed the rest of tech has one product for everyone. Yeah, they do. But dating is different. Actually, so is Match because Match, $30 billion dating app company.

They got a monopoly on monogamy. I love the way you said that. This company is worth six times more than the second next online dating company, Bumble. Yeah, and it's known for Tinder and Hinge. When you hear Match, they own Tinder and their own Hinch. And when you hear somebody got engaged, you asked them, did you meet each other on Tinder or Hinch? Yeah, the priest at the wedding is like, honestly, which one was it? Stir, however, is different.

It's exclusively for single parents. And it's interesting for them to go into this direction because the United States happens to have the highest rate of one parent homes on Earth. There's 20 million single parents in the United States according to match. Oh, and perfect timing jack. Well, perfect time for them, not for us. Exactly. Yesterday was national single parents. There we go.

Now, basically what Stur is doing, what Lindsay Lohan tried to pull off in the parent trap, but they're just trying to do it a little faster, a little more digital. Yeah, Stur is not trying to get divorced couples back. That's true. That's a fair clarification. But they are trying to get single parents with other single parents. They're like Dennis. You would like a London flat. Natasha, you would like a nap of winery. Oh, I actually think you mixed. Oh, no, you got that right. Yeah, he's got the nap one. He's got the nap one. You're right. Natasha, you're into Cabernet. Dennis, you're into a nice London party. I told you you're right. Stop rubbing in how much you know this movie. So Match has basically created the digital Lindsay Lohan. And by doing so, Match didn't just take Tinder its most recognizable app.

and change the branding for a 46-year-old single day. Actually, what we find fascinating about this story is that Match created new features that adapt to the dating needs of single parents. It's the only dating app we've ever seen with a built-in calendar. That's the feature. It doesn't have swiping. Instead, it has a calendar. Because if you're three years divorced with three kids,

there may only be three hours a week that you are free to see people. So you can filter the app to see who else is free on the afternoon. on just Tuesdays and Thursdays like you. Right. This way, the kids will get you most of the time, and you'll still have time to seek romance. Now, Matches new app stir. They call this MeTime, like, that's the name of the feature.

And it encouraged you to, like, show this. It's showing your calendar to everyone. And if you show it effectively, MeTime could become WeTime. Yeah, because you only happen to be available 2 PM Tuesdays between school drop off and soccer pickup and working overtime. This isn't just a rebranded Tinder. This is grown-up Tinder that has to be. going on in their lives.

It actually has stuff going on. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Match? The dating app industry does the opposite of the rest of tech. Yes, it does. The dating app industry does verticals. Yeah, Snackers, big tech. It's all about going horizontal. Appeal to all users with the same product.

Think about Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and YouTube. Huge companies. Oh, yeah. But there's just one app and one brand and one experience. for the whole world. But Jack and I are looking at the situation with dating apps, they're all balkanized. They're splintered. They're differentiated.

And they are doing that on purpose. Match has like 50 dating apps because each dater needs to be comfortable online dating. And that requires a different app for different types of daters. Well, it turns out Match owns dozens of dating apps for a dozen different demographics based on different life stages. For instance, they have an app called Our Time. For people who are over 50. And Hawaii. For Muslim singles.

And finally, Chisper. Which is just for Latinos. Next, Matt should launch a dating app just for video games. Well, why not? You play Pong in the messages before you like RRL meet up with someone. It could be cool. You're only going to meet somebody in person who's decent at Pong. You don't swipe, you get Pong.

The rest of tech goes horizontal. Dating apps go vertical. Because dating, it's just different. For our second story, Applebee's, is starting to look less like Olive Garden and more like McDonald's. Because you don't have to be fast food to have drive-through. Okay, Jack, can I ask you just, I got to get this off my chest, all right? Go ahead.

Here we go, here we go. Olive Garden, they got breadsticks. False. They have the tour of Italy. Okay, okay. Then chilies, you got ribs if you don't want to be a stickler. Yeah. Right.

Okay. Outback steakhouse, they have the bloomin onion. True. Yeah. What is Applebee's have? Dater skin. Deep fried, double-dipped, double-fried potato skins. Right.

Everything Applebee serves could, like, burn you. as hot as Mordor. Snackers, if you want to know what kind of restaurant this is, it's not fast food. It is a sit-down, full-service Applebee's restaurant. That is classic. That is what Applebee's is. And they're owned by Dyn Brands Global,

publicly traded company, worth $1.3 billion. Tickr symbol D-I-N for dinner. They also own IHOP, which is just a good sister restaurant to have. And fast food restaurants like McDonald's, they're about fast volume. Oh, totally. You know, you're making 60 cents on a Big Mac,

but you're serving three trillion Big Macs a day. Applebee's isn't like McDonald's. No, it's not. They're about slow margin. Right, you're going to hang out at Applebee's for like one and a half hours chewing a steak. It's slow. But Applebee's knows you and your softball buddies are going to get three rounds of three times marked up margaritas too. So it's worth it.

Those Appletis are a profit puppy. By the way, I can't believe the first restaurant you took me to in Brattleboro was an Applebee's. I know. I don't know what I was thinking. There's way better restaurants than that. You come to New York. I think I took it like Nobu Tribeca. Yeah.

I had no idea what I was doing. So because of the Snackers, Applebee's, they've just never done drive-thru. They never had a drive-thru didn't need it. Because they're not a fast food restaurant. They want you inside and washing down those tater skins with a margarita. More carbs on carbs. But Snackers, here's the news. Applebees, they're changing all that.

They're pivoting from their dining room to your living room. According to CNBC, Applebee's just whipped up a faster, smarter drive-through concept than unlike any fast food company has ever dreamed in their wildest imaginations. One reason it's faster and smarter is because you can only order way ahead of time on the Applebee's app. Exactly. So it's faster because you're not like stopping to talk to someone early on. You're like cruising through this at 25 miles per hour. Right. And since you order ahead, you're not telling your order into a microphone window five times, yelling at the machine.

Totally. Is that no cheese or yes, please? I think you said no cheese, but I can't tell you said no cheese. And at the Applebee's drive-thru, you're not going to sit at the window after being handed the bag to take inventory to make sure you're not getting ripped up. Because you get home, you know, and you're like, oh, they forgot the wasabi. And if you forgot the wasabi, you can't just go to a bodega and get wasabi. I know you wanted salad, but you're getting mozzarella sticks. Not the situation. Snackers, get this. It is one person's job at these Applebee's drive-thrus to double-check every order.

They're like Santa. They're checking it twice. Like literally the whole industry of food, they need more employees. Applebee's devoted someone to like being that person in your class who triple check their work. They're called order accuracy checkers and they slap an order accuracy sticker on the bag to make you feel like you got the oil. Oh, wait, there's more. Jack, can we talk about the drive-through Applebee's call center? In case they thought you said yes, cheese.

But you actually said Bahama Breeze? I actually said leader of cola. You can call someone to complain. This is a drive-thru. It is faster. It is more dependable. And it's from Applebee, shockingly. It's not from McDonald's.

We actually think this is more like takeout because like takeout, you order ahead of time like an hour and you only show up when your meal's ready. We're at a point now that nearly one third of Applebee's sales are from outside the restaurant like with drive-fers. And based on this drive-thrues news, they want that fraction even higher. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for all of our buddies enjoying Cheetos flavored wings over at Applebees? Applebee's has come to a fork in the road. They're taking the fork. They are restaurant snackers. They diverge into two paths.

Fast food or slow food, aka dine in. Sure, maybe do you use some takeout or delivery. Yeah. But you have to focus on either fast food as your restaurant business or dine in. Well, Applebee's is saying, no, we're not choosing. We think we can do both really well. And that's thanks to this next generation drive-through their building, which leaves the dine-in experience unaffected. This is completely unprecedented.

Applebees thinks you don't have. to pick one road, Robert Frost. They think you can choose both. They think you can take the fork. They're just taking the whole fork. Shout out to Yogi Berra. For our third and final story, Endeavor just announced that the Ultimate Fighting Championship had its best year ever in its history. No matter how you do the math, though, fighter pay at UFC hasn't kept up. First of all, can we cruise down the PCH over to Beverly Hills, California, please? Lovely neighborhood. This is where Endeavor Global is based. And Endeavor loves entertaining.

You really do want to have your headquarters in like a nice residential neighborhood. That's pretty nice. Oh, you're not entertained. Originally a talent agency. You want to picture Ari Gold from Entourage when you're thinking of Endeavor, the company. That's because the CEO is Ari Emanuel. The guy who Ari Gold from Entourage is based on. But he's doing the movie.

Ari Gold is Ari Emanuel. Endeavor also produces live events. They do video streaming. and they own three professional sports sales. Yeah, like we said, they love entertainment. And they IPOed last year. The stock is up 20% in that one year since they've been public. Not bad.

Now, as Nick mentioned, this company loves entertainment. They're like really love entertainment. The CEO, however, wasn't entertained by one question from one analyst after the earnings report. Endeavor just announced their fourth quarter earnings. And one analyst asked the Endeavor CEO if he was paying the UFC fighters enough. Endeavor bought all of Ultimate Fighting Championship in 2021. Yes, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which is like boxing, but really much more scary and like with a higher tattooed a skin ratio.

Those are all facts. Yeah, they are. They are facts. And Endeavor relies on UFC. Half of Endeavor's profit comes from Ultimate Fighting Championship. Snackers, half of Endeavor's profit is from men and women drop kicking each other on the chin. The CEO dismissed the question from this. analyst about fighter.

Come on, man. He's like, you want to come up here? Come on. You want to make this personal? You want to go outside? I'm right over here, man. No. He actually asked the CFO to confirm, and he said, we have increased the pay for fighters by

600% since 2005. Jack, it's a fair point. That's a fair number, except there's one problem with that number. 2005 is almost 20 years ago. It was a long time ago. So 600% jump isn't as big as it's down. And that's not the only problem with that statistic. Over the same period, UFC revenues have grown by more than three times that much.

Yeah, if so facto, what we're trying to say here, the pay for fighters in the octagon battling it out is way down as a percentage of the ultimate fighting championships total revenue. Okay, that's UFC. It is. Let's compare the UFC's fighter pay to the player pay at the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, and Major League Baseball. Jack, I'm so glad you asked because players in the four major American sports leagues, they get, half of all the money that the league brings in. That's largely because they have players unions, which negotiate with the owners to get half of the revenue the sports create. But in the ultimate fighting championships, the fighters in the octagon are losing teeth and they're not represented

by a union. And the CEO won't say how much the fighters are getting paid as a percentage of revenue. In fact, those UFC fighters are estimated to just get a tiny 20% or less of the league's total revenues. Which is less than half the revenue split of the other four major splits. Yeah, so the analyst really should have asked the CEO of Endeavor, how much would you need to get paid to get locked into an arm bar? So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Endeavor? The UFC's greatest threat is actually its greatest product, Connor McGregor. Because Snackers, the ultimate fighting championship, it has a one-man problem.

The UFC just had their best year in their 28-year history. They had over a billion dollars of revenue and nearly a 50% profit margin. Yeah, but it's not the ultimate fighting championship. The league is really the ultimate fighting Connor. That's right, because the five best pay-per-view events of the UFC's history were all events where Connor McGregor had the top-billed fight. Okay, so this is the risk Jack and I are imagining. Imagine for a second that that one fighter, Connor McGregor, left the UFC to help create a competing fighting championship, totally different league. A new octagon, a totally different octagon with, importantly, higher pay for punches.

for the fighters. Kick things up a notch, making a nonagon. It's got nine sides, different ring. Dodecahedron? Snackers, rival leagues have launched before in professional sports. None have really caught on so far. But the UFC, it's basically a one-man show. And the UFC doesn't pay its players like other major leagues do. Jack, can you whip up the takeaways for us for T-Boy Tuesday? Match Group's latest dating app is built specifically for single parents. Yeah, Big Tech does one app. Dating apps do dozens. Robert Frost said that two paths diverge at a fork, I took the one less travel. Yeah, well then Yogi Barra came to a fork in the road and he just took the fork. He took the whole fork. Yogi Barra took the fork. The entire utensil. Our third and final story is

Endeavor Group, whose stock is up 12% in the past week after some impressive earnings. Except its greatest product is its greatest risk. The really strong guy. Now, it's time for our snack fact of the day. This one sent in by Griffin Trow from lovely Arlington, Virginia. Nick, in just over 100 years' time, the city of Leviv in Western Ukraine has had five different flags over it. Snackers, get this. If you're from Leviv, Ukraine, you could have been born under the Austro-Hungarian empire a hundred years ago. Back in 1918. Yeah. And then, after that was over, you could have been educated in Poland. But still been living in Levy. And then you may have lived through the Nazi occupation of West Ukraine. But still,

in the city of Lviv. And then worked in the Soviet Union. Also in Lviviv. And finally retired in Ukraine. And never left the same town. Lviv, Ukraine. Snackers, if you got any snack facts on Ukraine, send them our way. We got a Google form.

The link is in the podcast description of each episode. Jack and I love getting him and we love seeing you tomorrow. Nick and I, you see you that. And before we go, congratulations to Snackers. Fernanda and Michael Godley just had their anniversary down in Quito, Ecuador. Happy birthday. of Mary in Richmond, Virginia. And Antonese in Newport Beach, California, enjoy the birthday.

Big shout out to Dorsey Campbell, the best darn pickleballer in all of Baltimore. Doing all that wall ball in Baltimore. And happy birthday, JJ O'Grath. Chicago, Logistics, and Marie turning one years old, maybe our youngest snacker in Thompson, Connecticut. Happy birthday, Marie. This is Jack. I own stock of Amazon and Bumble, and Nick and I both on stock of Pellatown. 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 on the basis for any investment decision. Any third-party information provided therein does not reflect the views of Robin Hood Markets, Inc., Robinhood 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. Daterskins!