burger king Archives - Lazy Man and Money

The other day, I got some coupons from Burger King in the mail. Typically, I give them one look and discard them.

Why? Most of the time they require the purchase of fries and a drink. I have trouble looking at that without thinking, “Hmmm, fried starchy carbs and sugary or chemically drinks at extremely high margins.”

This time, there were a couple of items of interest, some buy one get one free breakfast sandwiches. These, of course, are not a pillar of health, but at least there’s significant protein. With the coupons they would be reason.

I mentioned it to my wife and she was not interested. Instead she cited the recent news regarding Burger King.

By now, you’ve probably read of Burger King buying the Canadian company Tim Horton’s. It seems that everyone has come to the conclusion that it has done so to legally move its headquarters to Canada and avoid paying US taxes.

A couple of days later, I mentioned that the idea of boycotting Burger King could make for an interesting article. She doused it a bit by bringing up the points that it was already extremely low on her list of places to eat. She doesn’t like the food (save the Italian chicken sandwich) and the health topic has already been addressed. I’m more tolerant of the food’s taste, but even so, I only visit it about once a year.

I’m sure Burger King is trembling at the thought of losing $7 a year of revenue from us.

Tossing that aside, should we boycott companies that make moves like these? I consider myself a very Patriotic person and my instinct is to say, “Hell Yeah!”

When I think about it more, I’m not so sure. Burger King has a responsibility to its shareholders to maximize profits. If taking advantage of legal tax codes allows it to do that, is that so terrible? I haven’t met anyone who has said, “I like to pay more taxes for the good of my country, so I’m not going to take advantage of my 401K/Roth IRA.”

If Burger King doesn’t take advantage of these legal tax codes should we chastise them for not maximizing profits for its shareholders?

Sometimes I think big moves like this are needed to fix a broken system. Perhaps the United States government should take a look at this and ask, “Is our tax code effective if companies are effectively trying to buy their way out of country? What can we do to make the system better?”

I’m not sure what the answer is there. I’m not a tax expert and when it comes to corporate taxes, I admit to being particularly ignorant. However, perhaps if the majority of taxation was shifted towards sales tax at the point of purchase, it would matter less where a company’s headquarters is located.

It’s rare where I can see sympathize with both sides. Readers know that I tend to have strong opinions. If it wasn’t obvious in the article, I’m clearly on the fence. Let me know what you think

The recently expired merger offer from Microsoft to Yahoo got me thinking about two things: what went wrong and what can we learn from it. On a lot of levels the merger makes a lot of sense. Microsoft needs to ramp up their search capabilities to compete with Google. Acquiring Yahoo would give them a boost in the right direction. There are a lot of other parts to Yahoo’s business that would also help Microsoft’s cause. So why isn’t Microhoo up and battling against Google today?

Corporate Culture Clash

Nearly ten years ago, I worked for an Internet media/publishing company. We had a rival in the exact same space. It was Coke/Pepsi, McDonalds/Burger King. Each day we woke up and tried to think up with a way to get their readers. I’m sure they did they same for us. One day we woke up and something had changed… their company had acquired us.

How do you think this turned out? If you said disastrously, you’d get the gold star. We resented them. They had most of the high-level execs. Our social capital was destroyed – each employee had to prove themselves to a new boss. And then there was The Big Project… merging the two companies publishing systems. Each engineer knew that they were digging the grave of their job – each line of code written was a small shovel of dirt.

What is different about Yahoo and Microsoft? I don’t see much as they’ve been corporate enemies for too long

Don’t Get Greedy

Sometimes the best offer is the first offer. Yahoo reportedly thought that Microsoft would raise their first offer. Instead of taking the 40% gain and running with it, Yahoo wanted to stick it out for another 10%.

There’s a big myth that you should never take the first offer. That’s bovine excrement. If the first offer is a good one, then you should take it. I’m usually not a big fan of Microsoft, but in this instance they did what I would have done… come with the best offer.

Get it in writing

Yahoo said Microsoft never put it’s $33/share offer in writing. I’m dumbfounded that people who run billion dollar corporations would let this stop them. How difficult is it for Yahoo to say, “That $33/share offer interests us. Could you put it writing and we’ll have our people look it over?” I can’t imagine anything easier.

Every now and again someone approaches me about some business opportunity related to this website. The person often want me to call them. I almost universally reject the invite to speak on the phone. I want a written record (even if it’s e-mail) of any potential business deal. If she/he can’t describe the proposal in an e-mail, it’s not one I would be interested in.

In the end, I think Microsoft and Yahoo could work this out – the deal is not over. However, if they can’t work together at this stage, it can’t bode well for a potentially merged company.