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Cumberland Farms has just filed for an IPO and this is the S1 breakdown you probably didn't think you needed. You're going to stay for the fuel and snack unit economics plus a heavy dose of private equity platform build and buy execution at scale. Grab your Slurpee and let's get into it. Is this thing on? Yesterday's price is not today's price. Cumberland Farms is permanently woven into the fabric of my adolescence. On school half days we'd walk quote uptown, which sounds exciting, but it really wasn't. There was no Duncan in my town, There was no Starbucks, there was a Cumberland Farms and there was the parking lot in front of the Cumberland Farms and we would loiter in that parking lot for three hours drinking slushies and eating candy and being annoying 14 year olds with nowhere to be. It was my definition of freedom. There was a guy working the front register back then who looked exactly like Skinny Pete from Breaking Bad, and when I stopped in for a granola bar this year while visiting my parents home 20 years later, he was still standing behind the same counter ringing people up. He appears to have achieved full tenure. I hope Skinny Pete makes out like a bandit on this IPO because he's really put in the work. It's all there man, every dollar. This was also peak south beach diet back then. I think this is probably like in the 2005, 2006 time frame. So in naturally I invented a personal variant where I ate less at lunch and drank an extra large Slurpee from Cumberland Farms every single day on the theory that liquids simply do not count towards caloric intake. There were roughly 3,000 calories and like a bajillion grams of sugar in those things, which it didn't really matter because I was chugging them in between football two days in the August heat. If you're not from Massachusetts like I am and you don't have the attachment like Pennsylvania has Wawa, Florida has Racetrack. Cumbeez is our version, except it's not as nice and it's staffed by someone who's visibly furious to be working there on a cold December and having to clean up after people who trek salt on their boots in to get coffee. And if you've seen the Casey Affleck Dunkin Donuts commercials, you could drop him into a cumbies and not change a single frame of that commercial. Which is why the most disorienting thing in this entire filing is that Cumberland Farms is an absolute powerhouse in Europe. More than half of its stores are over there scrolling the European Portfolio gave me a flashback to eating Chicken Francese at a gas station in rural Tuscany in 2009, which was, and I need you to trust me here, folks. Excellent gas station Chicken Francese. Pit stops in Europe are full blown malls. It's way different than the Cumberland farms that I grew up with. From the outside it looks like any other London convenience store. But once inside you discover it's anything but. It's very juxtaposition to the rubbery taquitos of my youth that were rotating on this greasy pinwheel for several weeks at a time. All right, a few key stats here before we drown in debt. So, revenue 16.3 billion down 4%. So it was down from 17 billion in 24 and 18 billion in 23. So they have three straight years of revenue decline. Q1 of 26 was up 7%. But that's fuel price, not more customers because gallons actually fell by 2%. So I want you to ignore this line and pass go straight to gross profit because this is the closest thing to a revenue number that matters and. And it is not grown in three years. So their gross profit was 2.675 billion, down 3% year on year. Not great. Adjusted EBITDA was 693 million, down 5% year on year it was down from 24 and slightly down from 23. But Q1 of 26 was 137 million in adjusted EBITDA versus 102 million in the quarter of the previous year, up 34%. First green shoot in this filing. Net loss from continuing operations in 25. They lost 145 million and 270 million in 24. So they've lost money in both of these years. They had this weird 1.9 billion of net income in 23, but that was a sale leaseback gain. So they were actually selling the real estate that they bought up to try to pay down some of their debt, which we'll get into later. Fuel volume down 2.7% year on year. Yeah, down three years in a row. Fuel margin was 43.8 cents per gallon. Same store sales in FY25. Well, the US specifically. Fuel gallons down 1.2 and inside sales down 1.7. The American business, it's honestly shrinking on a like for like basis. And every growth initiative in this prospectus is a plan to fix that segment. Adjusted ebitda. We'll talk about the different aspects of their business lines later, but let's break it out by country. So the U.S. 360 million. Europe 365, 4 million in adjusted profits. The U.S. fell 25% year on year. Europe now out earns America. So the company that just renamed itself after a Massachusetts dairy chain and moved its headquarters to Charlotte in the US is being carried by Germany and Benelux. So get on my back. As Greg Jennings once said, dog. He put the team on his back. Total debt 5.788 billion. And this does not include the over $1 billion in additional debt they took on after the March 31st balance sheet. In his filing, cash 268 million, not a ton because they have to sweep it all to pay down the Revolvers. Net leverage of 8x on an adjusted EBITDA ratio. Interest expense was 668 million in 2025, which is 96% of adjusted EBITDA and 322% of operating income. Show me what that debt do. Employees 32,252. About half in Europe, half in the US. Revenue per employee 507,000. Gross profit per employee 83,000. Neither number means much in retail. But you, yeah, you didn't even ask. So I'm going to give you the math because I already did it. Loyalty members 6 million up from 300,000 13 months ago. So the single most interesting number in this document, and they say it super nonchalantly, they're offering 1 billion to raise at a reported 9 billion valuation. NASDAQ ticker CMBY, come B Bank of America lead left, then Goldman, then Jefferies. Proceeds go to repaying USD in euro term loans. Foreign private issuer in a controlled company. No 10Qs, no 8Ks, no REG FD. I say F1 over and over in this because if you're a foreign issuer, they don't call it an S1, they call it an F1. I'm not making that mistake and confusing it with race car driving. So what's the tldr? Well, the company started as a single petrol forecourt. That's a new vocab word I feel. British in bury, England in 2001, it ate its way across the continent on borrowed money, got too heavy for its own good, sold off half of itself to survive, is now going public under the name of that 1939 New England namesake. The other option was to adopt the other acquired name, Loaf and Jug, which can mean many things to many people. Funny line from the F1. On June 23rd, 2026, the company changed its name to Cumberland Farms Limited. So by my count that's five days more than a fortnight before filing for IPO. They buried it in the corporate information section between the Cayman registered office address and the phone number. And yes, there's a phone number if you want to call. So they have this cool graphic. Cool, I guess, where it's all the different logos and where it first started. So EG Group, so. And then you see Cumberland Farms scattered in there. And this is truly a platform strategy. So well into the mid-3000s of sites here. This deal, as we'll get into, comes down to a couple things. First, whether the growth story can work because, like it isn't really growing today. And their master plan is to rebrand 600 to 700 stores to Cumberland Farms and drop fried chicken into 500 of them. And by them, I mean US business, whose same store sales went negative last year. So not exactly a thriving enterprise to lift all ships. And there's a big question mark as to if the deleveraging math works because the company is geared at 8x debt to EBITDA and its interest payments consumed, like we said, 322% of operating income in 2025. For all those out there who are wondering, what the hell does Cumberland Farms do? Snacks and gas, baby. So fuel is the largest source of gross profit for this company, which surprised the hell out of me. I'd always assumed that gas was a doormat. It was priced near cost to get used through the door. So you'd buy Snickers at 40 points and it's far from it. Gas earns about a dime on every dollar and they sell so much of it that those dimes add up to more gross profit than everything inside the store combined. So fuel is 73% of revenue and 45% of gross profits. And so for all of you race fans out there, an 11.9 billion revenue fuel business and a 3.9 billion revenue snack business end up in a photo finish for gross profits. Like I said, got to sell a lot of that gas. But you can't really look at this as a revenue company. It's a gross Profit and EBITDA company. You can't model it down off to 16 billion in revenue. You'd land somewhere completely insane since most of that number is the wholesale cost of gas passing through the register of on its way back to Irving Oil. So start at the 2.7 billion of gross profit and work down Coco, Conco and the three ways to run a gas station. The filing uses these acronyms about 200 times and never stops to make them memorable. So, hey, I guess I will attempt here. Cocoa is company owned, company operated, Cumberland Farms owns the site and runs it. They hire the clerk, price the gas and the Slim Jims book all the revenue and eat all the operating costs. This is the highest margin and also the highest risk. And it's what you picture when you go into a typical commercial. Con Co is company owned, not company operated. So Cumberland Farms owns the real estate in this scenario and the fuel equipment and a dealer runs the store. The company still books the fuel revenue and pays the dealer a commission on gallons. But the dealer keeps the inside business with the snacks to sell all that stuff. This results in a thinner slice for Cumberland Farms and in exchange somebody else handles the guy trying to return a half drank Fanta. Other is a third party who owns the whole store outright. Cumberland Farms just supplies the fuel. This is a European thing, I guess, because there are no others in the US they have 551 other sites in Europe, so there are 1,463 sites in the US. 1400 of them are cocoa and that's company owned and operated. Only 63 of them are con company owned, dealer run. So that one is also more European. And there are no others third party owned in the US. In Europe though, I mean it's almost a 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 split. They got 714 Cocos, 514 Con Cos and 551 others. Europe be different. Like I said, United States is 96% cocoa. Europe is 40% cocoa. Can't believe I keep saying cocoa. In America they own and run essentially everything. Which is why the US carries the fat gross margins, the fat operating costs in most of the 32,000 employees, including skinny Pete. In Europe, over half the network belongs to dealers in Cumberland Farms is more akin to a fuel wholesaler. So two pretty different companies stapled together under one ticker. In the United States, they have the number five market position for convenience stores. And in Europe they have the number four market position. Hey, thanks for listening. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Everyone in finance is adopting AI right now. There's a problem because there are a dozen disconnected tools. You got one for revenue, one for ap, one for close. And each one of these needs training and documentation and the expertise to run them. Layers lives in your team's heads, not your systems. Maximore takes the opposite approach. One autonomous finance platform for the whole operation. Order to cash, procure, to pay the close, cash management, reporting running on a single unified finance context that pulls from your erp, billing, banks, even email and slack. Maximore runs on self learning agents that learn how your team already works. No prompts to write, no workflows to build, nothing to document. 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One platform that watches your exposure everywhere, automates compliance, and flags risk before it turns into that nasty gram. That's why thousands of finance leaders trust Anaroc to stay ahead. Talk to an Anaroc sales tax tax expert for a personalized exposure estimate@anrock.com RTN that is a N R O K.com RTN so why does being big and achieving scale actually matter in the convenience store game? And I expected this to be like the typical fluff that they throw into a pitch here, but it actually did make sense. So there are four reasons. The first one is fuel procurement. They bought 2.8 billion gallons last year and have committed to buying 6,492 million more under minimum volume contracts. That is a lot. Okay. A refiner will cut you a better rack price if you promise to take billions of gallons off their hands on a schedule compared to like the guy with four stations in Worcester who cannot make that promise. So said another way, every penny per gallon of buying advantage is worth about 27 million a year at their volume. Fun ratio. Yeah, back of the envelope math. Number two above site costs. So procurement, finance, hr, fuel pricing, it, legal and real estate. All of that corporate stuff runs out of two shared service centers. One in Charlotte, North Carolina and one in a place called Bolton, England. That's a fixed cost spread over 300,242 stores. It kind of becomes a drop in the bucket, right? So the CFO's salary gets spread over 3,242 stores. Pricing technology. So in 2025, they moved US fuel pricing onto a machine learning model that reads local conditions and prices site by site. You only build that if you've got thousands of these sites to run it across. The independent guy is squinting across the street, right, Just to look at what Dave is pricing his gas at and just moving it up or down a cent, right? It's based on gut and intuition. Number four, loyalty and retail media. So six million loyalty members generate a robust data set. It's pretty valuable. And in early 2025, they started renting that data set back to Coke and Frito lay's advertising through a partner called Axonet. Nobody buys retail media from a four store chain because they don't have any data. And yet in the same year they assembled all of it, they lost US market share, volumes fell, they blamed their own pricing model, reset it mid year and gave back fuel margin to win the customer's home. Ouch. All that scale and they still had to cut price to get people back to the pump. Americans are paying at the pump. Did you know that? So There are over 150,000 convenience stores in America and 63% of them belong to somebody who owns fewer than 10. That's why a London private equity firm is getting their hands dirty and buying up all these gas stations. When your competition is a guy with three stores and a personal guarantee on his fuel contract, you don't really need to be brilliant. You just need to be able to write a check. And convenience store demand holds up against online purchasing way better than retail as about 37% of shoppers walk into a convenience store every single day and another 42% go once or twice a week. Amazon flattened most of retail and did nothing at all to convenience because nobody is a drone delivering a Gatorade to the pumpkin. Recessions don't do much either. They are incredibly recession proof. Convenience stores also sell more than 80% of the gasoline purchased in this country. Sorry Costco from the filing. Our industry is large, highly fragmented, insulated from e commerce disruption. In recent years it has experienced increasing consolidation by scaled operators including ourselves. Cumberland Farms is the number five convenience store in the US by store count across 24 states. They're in 24 states including Massachusetts. Shared out MA and number four in Europe. That's what you can do with 5.8 billion of debt. Turns out almost $6 billion of debt can buy you a ton of convenience stores. This is kind of an aside, but what what does this filing tell you about electric vehicles? Because in the European Union, EVs were about 26% of new car sales in 2024. They were also about 4% of the cars actually on the road because people keep a car for about a decade. So the fleet turns over super slowly. The US is well, well behind Europe on both counts. Fun fact, there are actually more RVs on the road in the US than there are electric vehicles, believe it or not. Which is a large part of why the American business is the one that they're selling to. In this F1 statement, here's how they describe where fuel demand goes from here. We expect fuel volumes in our operating geographies to decline gradually over the long term due to improved vehicle efficiency, reduced average vehicle miles traveled, and increased adoption of hybrid and EVs, which will be partially offset by continued population growth. So Cumberland Farms is long the birth rate and short electric cars back to the debt. They carry 5.8 billion of debt against 693 million of adjusted EBITDA, which pencils to 8x. Most companies going public sit somewhere around 2x or 3x. Eight is around the range actually, where private equity is trying to do the opposite. They're trying to take them private and then fix that, not sell it. They said our interest payments were 322% of our income from operations. That is a quote from Filing. So the stores threw off 208 million of operating income last year and the lenders took 668 million in interest, which is how you end up owing $3 for everyone you made. And the ratio has gotten worse every single year because operating income is falling faster than they can retire at the principal. So where's all the cash? 268 million of cash at a company that rings up 16 billion of revenue is about six days of gross profit. And my first reaction was like whoa. I think I pulled the wrong number off the balance sheet. But I do not make mistakes. Except for that time I had gas stationed sushi in Mexico. Every dollar that comes through the register gets swept out to the revolver and the term loan. So nothing accumulates. They are managing cash flow and working capital super close to stay within their covenant good graces. Over on the asset side, 4.5 billion of the 11.9 billion is goodwill. Which is what piles up when you spend a decade buying gas stations with borrowed money back the goodwill out intangible equity is deeply underwater. So I did go spelunking for a REIT and found a receipt of it not working. So if you remember from the jersey Mike's S1 we recently did, they own like none of the sandwich shops. They're franchisors and they put the land and build out and operations in the hands of the franchisees. So I had to figure out if Cumbee's was actually a real estate investment trust play. Gas stations sit on valuable corners. There's a chain called Casey's that trades at a premium partly because of its own dirt. So I opened this filing expecting to find a couple billion of unencumbered real estate waiting for a prop code to spin up and sponsor an exit. But they already ran this play and it did not work. So In May of 2023, they sold 414 US properties in a sale leaseback took 1.5 billion of cash and booked a $920 million gain that flows straight into the 2023 net income line that we talked about. So when you see 1.88 billion of net income in 2023 and think this company used to make money, most of that came from selling the buildings and the cash went to lenders before anybody got to enjoy it. Hey, thanks for listening. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Here's a growth tax that nobody talks about. Every new pricing model you ship creates a nightmare for your finance team. Usage based pricing. Now you're tracking usage against commitments, product bundles. 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Here's what they're trying to do. The IPO will raise about a billion dollars if you add in the recent Australia sales of the shops they sold off there 830 million and all of it goes to the term loans and the leverage lands somewhere now around 5.5x. Okay, so plenty of retailers run at 5.5x and nobody blinks. But then you notice that they were still borrowing on the way to the printer for this F1 statement. So they took 550 million term loan on April 2026 and then another 500 million euro loan in June nine days before the name change to Cumberland Farms. Both landed after the March 31st balance sheet that is in this filing. So the 5.8 billion everyone is quoting is already out of date and it's not going in the direction that you want. So even if the paydown goes exactly to plan 4 billion of remaining debt at their blended rate. So cost north of 4,400 million a year of interest against 208 million of operating income. So that doesn't really pencil unless the growth story works. And that is a lot of weight to hang on. Gas Station Fried Chicken Gas Station Fried Chicken is the Fall River Massachusetts version of Chicken Francese. Let's talk about these massive FX gains that are just swirling around here. So one line in the P&L swings 150 million and it is not fuel related. So some of the debt is denominated in Euros while the company reports in dollars. So every quarter they remeasure that euro debt back into dollars and run the difference through the income statement. It produced a $152 million gain in FY25, a $150 million gain in Q2 of 25 and a $51 million. What the hell loss in Q1 of 26. So this is like a weird translation exercise and it's going to make the first year of public earnings look erratic for non operational reasons. Let's go through this growth tail and see if we buy it. The US business operates under a garage sale of names. You get Tom Thumb, Sprint, Turkey Hill Mini Mart, Certified Oil and our old friend Loafin Jug. That's what a decade of buying whatever regional chain was for sale looks like when nobody got around to painting the signs. So 600 to 700 of them become Cumberland farms over five years. That's about 130 a year making that change. And then they have to invest a quarter million to half million of Capex per store and they're targeting a return north of 20%. They've done 77 of these so far, mostly Tom thumbs in Florida and sprints in Georgia and South Carolina with all 101 loafing jugs in Colorado on deck. Then you get to the evidence because 11 converted Tom thumbs in Florida, small sample size and six months in did 5% more fuel gallons and 1% more inside sales in the month of April after excluding the stores that had fuel upgrades on road construction going on. So there's not a ton of evidence of this working yet. I also just like have a real affection for this brand, having spent my adolescence loitering in front of one. And that affection probably ends somewhere around Hartford, Connecticut, because nobody in Pueblo, Colorado is driving extra mile because hey, it's Cumberland Farms. I love this place. Let's talk about the chicken. Crispy, crunchy, it's in 31 stores today and they want it in 500 by 2030. So apparently a fryer in the build that runs 150 grand in a mature store will throw off 300,000 to 400,000 of incremental sales at a 50% margin. Wow. Stores at Chicken do 6% more inside sales and 9% more fuel volume because the guy driving over for a three piece tops off the tank while he's there. So spend 150k, get back roughly 175,000 gross profit per year. It's pretty good investment. This is honestly like the best capital allocation decision in the document. And it's about fried chicken, so CFOs take note. The coffee 120,000 cups of coffee a day. No wonder why those bathrooms are so abominable under a house blend called Farmhouse. And it's the biggest single piece of their US food business. So coffee is something that people buy on schedule. It's basically recurring revenue. The guy picking up large regular with cream and two sugars on the way to the job site will do it every single day of the week. Their Smart Rewards program had 300,000 members in March of 2025. Thirteen months later, they must have given away something here they blitzscaled it to 6 million. And the filing mentions it with about as much fanfare as the office address in Grand Cayman members buy 5% more fuel, they spend 5% more inside the store and buy 49% more tobacco. Which yeah, sure, I get that. They're a quarter of all transactions now. And inside sales tied to loyalty went from 8 million to 74 million. And 6 million identified shoppers is a data set like I said, that they can rent back to Coke, which is what Walmart and Kroger turned into billion dollar ad businesses. So a program that grew 20x in a year usually got there by handing something out. And if that something was sent off a gallon, then those 6 million people are worth less than the number says because they were bought. Promotional spend per employee is not in this document. Neither is how many of the 6 million have opened the app since. Okay, so 74 million across 6 million members is 12 bucks ahead a year. That's a Slurpee and my Aunt Denise's scratch ticket. Potential red flags. This gets fun. They told the SEC their accounting is broken. Like all of it. Internal controls have five tests and most companies they might cop to one material weakness, maybe two if it's a super rough year in their own F1. We identified material weaknesses in our internal controls over financial reporting related to all five components of the COSO framework. So five for five, High score. Does that mean I broke it? Number two, whole C suite. Still looking for the bathroom. They got here about 10 minutes ago. The CEO is new CFO started in July of 25. Chief legal officer June of 25, chief accounting officer October 25th chief people officer January 26th. So every executive whose name in this document has been in the chair for a year or less. And by the way, they have material weaknesses and they're going public at 8x leverage. So do with what you will. Number three, they were lending money to their own parent company at Sonia, plus 6.55%. So tucked into the related party. Footnote. 127 million of interest income in FY25 from loans crumbling farms made to its own parent. Sonia is not my ex girlfriend. It is the Sterling overnight index average. That is 18% of adjusted EBITDA earned by lending money upstairs to the guy who controls the company. The balance was 5.6 billion in December and 1.9 billion by March 31. So roughly 3.7 billion moved. I don't know, somewhere in one quarter. Where did it go? Nobody knows. But they claim it all gets settled before the IPO closes. Cool. Number four, Big Tobacco is funding the loyalty program. So they're p tier. Weird name. 122,000 members is paid for by Altria loyalty. Members buy 49% more tobacco than everyone else. Tobacco is roughly 10% of revenue. Also, did you know it's addictive? Number five, farm. Private issuer control company, Cayman Charter. That's a trifecta. Like I said, no 10 Qs, no AKs, no Reg. FD. They get to file late. So if you want to sue them, pack a bag, you're going to the Caymans. Number six, one supplier is 31% of their entire cost base. The largest fuel supplier is 31% of total cost and they've committed to buying 6.5 million gallons under minimum volume controls. Those commitments are exactly why they get that good rack price. It's also why if gallons keep sliding and gallons have slid three years running, they're contractually obligated to keep buying gasoline they may have to sell at a discount. Number seven, the balance sheet is stale. AF financials run through March of 26. Since then they took over a billion dollars of additional debt out. Neither one is in that debt figure that we already quoted. Who's in the cap table. So EG Group is the roll up entity. It's actually what this was called up until a few weeks ago when they rebranded to Cumberland Farms and two parties built EG and will keep control after the IPO. The first is TDR Capital. It's a London private equity firm with about 16 billion under management, which also owns a large European supermarket called asda. The second is the Issa brothers, Mohsen and Zuber who started this whole thing. They bought that single gas station in bury, England in 2001 and just never stopped buying stuff. TDR merged its own gas station business with theirs in 2016 and the combined thing became EG Group, which became Cumberland Farms. Then they went shopping about 760 convenience sites from Kroger, 570 Cumberland Farm stores, 540 Woolworths sites in Australia which they sold over 2000 Esso sites across Italy and Germany. But then they go selling. Since 2023 they've been selling it all back. The UK for more than 3 billion. Italy for 450 million. Australia sold for 830 million. They buy the world on debt and then sell half the world to pay the interest. What's left is what you're buying now. So America, Germany, Benelux, a parent entity still named EG Group limited sits above you and keeps all the votes. What do the comps look like? Well, nobody good is public. The comp set here is thin, if I'm being honest. Wawa's private sheets is private, so we're a quick trip. Buc EE's and a racetrack. They're all family owned or employee owned. So when you go looking for a comparable company, the four you're left with are Casey's Couchtard, which is Circle K, Murphy usa, the kiosk in the Walmart parking lot, and a levered rollup called ARCO that nobody talks about because it's no bueno valuation. They're asking for roughly 9 billion of equity on a 1 billion raise. If you tack on the 5.8 billion of net debt, you're paying 14.8 billion of enterprise value for 693 million of adjusted EBITDA, which is 21x. So Cumberland Farms wants the Casey's multiple, But they have Arco's balance sheet which is a problem here. And Arcos trades at 11.5x, right? Not great. Casey's is the business that bankers want on the page and I get why it's trading at 24x against a 10 year median of 11.5x because it grew EBITDA 24% last year and its prepare food operations runs like a well oiled qsr. Then there's arco, which I'd argue is the closer read on what Cumberland Farms actually is. Which is unfortunate for Cumberland Farms because ARCO is a rollup of regional convenience brands that nobody outside of the 3 mile radius has heard of, including myself. It's levered at about 8x just like Cumberland Farms. It's also lost money last quarter and it's busy converting company operated stores to dealer operated stores, which is the exact Coco to Con co move going down in this filing. Oh, and it franchises fried chicken and it leans on the loyalty program. And in February it took a subsidiary public and used 207 million of the proceeds to pay down debt, which is also what you're being asked to fund here. So arco trades at 11.5x EBITDA. The entire company is worth less than $1 billion. So tough comp. They're basically asking you like hey can we have another 6.8 billion on top of what the market pays for a company that looks a lot like this one. So perhaps the gap is made up of childhood nostalgia, slushies and scratch tickets. Miscellaneous stuff of note. B of A is lead left. Knock Goldman. So the COVID reads B of A securities, then Goldman, then Jefferies. Goldman has been lead left on basically everything this year and getting bumped to the two hole on a $9 billion deal is not nothing. It usually means someone's relationship banker has been camped out in Charlotte for two years. Massachusetts was the last state in the country to allow the little clip on the gas pump. Okay, I had to put this in there so you know what I'm talking about. You squeeze the handle and you flip the metal tab up and you can walk away and go inside. Not so every other state had the Massachusetts ban them from 1970s until January 1st of 2015 on the theory that you'd get back in your car, build up static on the seat, I don't know, grab the nozzle and light yourself on fire. So for 40 years, everyone I knew jam their gas cap into the handle instead. If you know, you know. The reason it belongs in this filing is that one of the arguments against the clips was that a customer stuck holding the nozzle does not wander inside and buy a soda. So the clip is an inside sales tool. And inside sales run at 31% margin, which is like the gas only runs at 10. Right. So we gotta fix that. The rollout took years anyway because nobody wanted to pay for the new nozzles. They employ 32,252 people and never mention health insurance. So the employee benefits section of this filing covers pensions jubilee awards for long service bridge pensions and voluntary redundancy packages. But all of that is for the European people, right? There's not one word about health coverage for the 16,597 people working in America. So it's a far and private issuer. And they don't have to actually file human capital disclosures. So they didn't. What they do say is they keep a flexible workforce of hourly part time and temporary workers so they can adjust staffing on short notice. And that the employee handbook has an anti bullying policy. That's really cool. Robert Swan, the former CEO of Intel is on the board of a gas station, which is a hell of a third act. Summer is the good quarter. I always like to talk about seasonality. So demand for fuel, snacks and food all run higher in summer than winter because people drive more. Worth remembering when the first few quarterly prints come out and everybody acts surprised. This is funny, but the charts in this F1 filing look like someone's Excel model because they are. So rather than hiring a graphic designer, they just took screenshots. None of this is investment advice. I wrote this for my home office. Hyped up on stale AF Cumberland Farms coffee. I I wish you an IPO with ample float and a working hold open clip at your gas station. Peace. Run the numbers is a mostly media production. Yelling an intro by Fat Joe artwork by Meg Delesandro. Show is executive produced by Ben Hillman. Nothing said on this podcast is intended to be business or investment advice. It's the sole opinion of me, a guy who feeds his dog way too much ice cream and has a history of net operating losses. Lol. If you like this podcast, hit subscribe and give us five stars. 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